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LAZY LAUGHTER 


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LAZY LAUGHTER 


BY 

WOODWARD BOYD 

AUTHOR OF “ THE LOVE LEGEND ” 



CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
NEW YORK :: :: :: :: 1923 


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Copyright, 1923, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


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Printed in the United States of America 


Published October, 1923 




© C1A760562 



OCT 29 *23 























To 

TOM 


CONTENTS 

BOOK ONE: THE TEA-TIME TOILERS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

One: Dusty Grandeur. 3 

Two: The Curled and Wealthy Darlings ... 16 

Three: Sixteen. 25 

Four: The Experiment. 42 

Five: Debut . 56 

Six: Pal. 70 

Seven: Symphony . .. 78 

Eight: The Working-Girl Characterization ... 92 

Nine: Christmas.104 

Ten: Onward and Upward and Onward .... in 


BOOK TWO: THE CONTINUOUS LULL 


One: Boarding-House.123 

Two: Huneker of the Grammar-School .... 136 

Three: Cafeteria Romance.154 

Four: Reliance.164 

• • 

Vll 












CONTENTS 


• i • 

Vlll 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Five: The Pirate’s Den.176 

Six: Number Nine Pearson Street.185 

Seven: The Beloved Boy.201 

Eight: Thank God, Fasting, for a Good Man’s 

Love.210 

Nine: Party.222 

BOOK THREE: THE CAKE OF IDLENESS 

One: The Grandson of a Sluggard.239 

Two: Alec.247 

Three: Quarrel.262 

Four: Disaster.269 

Five: The Brilliant Idea.279 

Six: Thus Things Proceed in their Circle: thus 

the Empire is Maintained.290 













BOOK ONE 


THE TEA-TIME TOILERS 




CHAPTER ONE 
DUSTY GRANDEUR 


The edifice which Charles Montgomery, with the 
whimsy considered in those days to be a social asset, 
had called his little crooked house, was a pile of ugly 
gray limestone built on the very edge of the sidewalk 
and in consequence leering over Summit Avenue like 
a majestic drunkard. Charles Montgomery had 
built it so close to the street because, he said, he 
wanted to be home when he got home. To get out 
of his carriage and climb five stone steps was quite 
enough exercise for him, and damn the artistic ap¬ 
proach. Charles Montgomery had been the languid 
president of one of the more unimportant railroads; 
the house was always pointed out as the home of an 
empire builder. It had four towers and embodied 
four historical periods in architecture, a fact which 
Charles Montgomery himself was among the first to 
discover and satirize, for in his latter days Grand¬ 
father Montgomery acquired a humorous aloofness 
to his family and surroundings which displayed itself 
as naturally as if he had always had it. 

When delicate health had brought him from the 

3 


4 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


east he had been young and imbued with the pioneer 
ideal; an ideal incongruous and even repugnant to 
his nature. In those days he had been worried 
about his lack of the thing called push and go. It 
was natural to him to deprecate pushing, and going 
seemed to him always to be scarcely worth while 
when he was so comfortable in the place in which he 
was. He did, however, have an asset which few of 
the hardier pioneers of that day possessed: a quan¬ 
tity of ready money. And in the hands of those men 
who were turning over fortunes in the northwest in 
the fifties, this money became a moderate fortune, 
enabling Charles Montgomery to retire and spend 
his years, discovering a philosophy which would en¬ 
able him to enjoy his ease with a comfortable con¬ 
science. But since those days the house had fallen 
from its place of dominance. It was still one of the 
largest homes in the city, but a hundred smaller 
places were much smarter. Its grandeur was 
thought by every one, and most especially by the 
daughters of Charles Montgomery themselves, to 
have a touch of absurdity. And neither of them had 
the slightest talent for operating an establishment 
of any kind, much less one of its size. So even before 
the spectacular sweeping away of the Montgomery 
fortune by Paul Hallowell, the husband of Margaret 
Montgomery, the old house had never been the 


DUSTY GRANDEUR 


5 

austere dignitary among houses which it so patently 
aspired to be. 

As Miriam Thorpe got out of her electric that after¬ 
noon and picked her way carefully over the icy pave¬ 
ment she was grateful to the dead Charles Mont¬ 
gomery for his notion of building the house so close 
to the walk. For she could not have gone in if there 
had been a long, uncared-for approach. Since the 
servants had gone, with the exception of one maid, 
it was almost impossible to get in as it was. Going 
up those steps where the snow, unshovelled and 
coated with ice, still lay, was as precarious as climb¬ 
ing a snowslide. She did achieve the top, and with 
a sigh of relief rang the bell, thinking, subconsciously, 
of tea, for she was rather fatigued and cold. Mar¬ 
garet Hallowell had telephoned that morning, asking 
her to stop for tea and to talk over the question 
about which the town was gossiping: Should she 
marry John Patlock before her husband had been 
dead six months? 

The maid, Zedda, answered Miriam Thorpe’s ring. 
A huge, ungainly girl, wearing a gray flannel dress, 
soiled and unkempt, as if to typify the family fortune, 
Zedda stood out as an individual to any caller at the 
house, partly because she didn’t wear a uniform and 
partly because she was the only person there who 
faintly approached capability. Miriam thought of 


6 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Charles Montgomery’s caprice of being unable to 
remember the names of the maids, and of addressing 
them as: “Hey, you, what the hell’s your name?” 
Could he ever have forgotten the name of Zedda, 
who said her father named her for a letter in the 
Greek alphabet ? She entered the living-room hall¬ 
way with its spacious reaches to the balconies of the 
third floor. Here and there only was a pretense of 
order, and even here dust lay thickly on the lower 
edges of the door panels, and a heap of rubbish had 
accumulated in the unused fireplace. 

“ Mrs. Hallowell, she says you’s to go on up to her 
room,” said Zedda. “She’s up there; I guess may¬ 
be she ain’t feeling any too good.” 

Miriam mounted the wide, carpeted staircase. On 
the landing, the nook where Charles Montgomery 
had loved to sit and read, was piled a heap of what 
looked like soiled laundry mixed with old news¬ 
papers. Three chairs had been shoved there to be 
out of the way some place else, presumably. As 
she mounted, the dust all around grew thicker. 

She found her way to Margaret Hallowell’s room 
easily, for she had been familiar with the old house 
since her childhood, and entered to find Margaret 
struggling inexpertly with a black frock which she 
was endeavoring to make over into a costume suit¬ 
able for the second-mourning period. Her daughter, 


DUSTY GRANDEUR 


7 


Dagmar Hallowell, a little girl of six, greeted Miriam 
Thorpe vociferously. 

Margaret Hallowell sighed. “The children are 
perfectly unmanageable,” she said. “Dagmar, do 
run and see what Herbie is doing.” 

Dagmar paid no attention to her mother’s request. 
She did, however, tactically retire into the back¬ 
ground and let the grown-up conversation go on 
without her assistance. She had little interest in it, 
though in spite of a certain attempt they made to 
be cryptic, she knew that they were talking of her 
mother’s proposed marriage to John Patlock. She 
looked speculatively at the things on her mother’s 
dressing-table and wondered if they would be of any 
assistance in making her beautiful. The cold-cream, 
the shining silver brushes, the perfumes in their 
pale, aristocratic bottles, all these things helped her 
mother. . . . 

“Dagmar!” (In the middle west this name is 
pronounced as it is spelled.) 

The child at the dressing-table was undisturbed, 
calmly refusing to be reprimanded. She continued 
imperturbably to finger her mother’s powder jar. 
Forgetting her, Margaret Hallowell went on: “What 
are people saying, Miriam? tell me frankly. So 
soon; yet what am I going to do ? . . . Dagmar, you 
are not to touch that perfume !” 


8 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Dagmar looked at herself in the mirror across the 
dressing-table and wondered what Gladys would 
say if she found out that her hair was not naturally 
curly. It would be quite awful. Gladys’s nurse 
brushed and brushed her hair every Monday morn¬ 
ing. “Because,” Gladys had told Dagmar, “it’s 
all right to put your hair up on curlers just for Sun¬ 
day, but people think you are awful if you do it on 
week-days too, unless it’s natural. My! I wouldn’t 
let my hair have a single kink in it on week-days for 
anything!” Dagmar was uncomfortable whenever 
she thought about it. Still, she didn’t have her 
hair put up every night, so perhaps it was almost 
naturally curly. 

“. . . and where will you find another man like 
John Patlock ?” Dagmar took note of the grown-up 
conversation. 

“I’m going to call him Daddy,” she said, contribut¬ 
ing casually. She dreamily lifted the stopper from 
the perfume bottle and rubbed it against her nose. 

“Dagmar Hallowell,” said Margaret, letting the 
underlying turbulence of her talk with Miriam 
Thorpe seize Dagmar like a powerful and angry 
undertow, “I told you, you were not to touch that 
perfume. Put it down at once.” 

Dagmar sniffed the perfume leisurely, thinking of 
John Patlock. “Well, when he’s my father, I guess 


DUSTY GRANDEUR 


9 


he’ll give me everything I want, pretty near,” she 
went on. 

“Dagmar, will you stop playing with that per¬ 
fume ? ” A note of hysteria had entered her moth¬ 
er’s voice. 

Dagmar rubbed the stopper on her dress on its 
way back to the bottle. Margaret stamped her foot. 
“You’re getting to be so naughty! I’m going to 
punish you hard one of these days.” Her voice rose 
with all the strength of suffering nerves. “You 
naughty, naughty girl; come away from that dress¬ 
ing-table !” 

Dagmar surveyed her mother with exquisite poise. 
“My,” she exclaimed, “you frighten me, Margaret. 
I don’t know when I’ve been so scared.” 

The two young women laughed. One of them ut¬ 
tered the age-old platitude about the modern child, 
and Dagmar pleasantly wondered if she couldn’t 
think of something else clever and amusing to give 
them. She began to be a decided nuisance. “Go 
and see what Herbie is doing,” said Margaret. 

“Oh, I know what he’s doing,” answered Dagmar. 
“He’s down in Paul’s study scaring himself with 
Paul’s ghost!” 

Margaret burst into tears. Paul had been her 
husband, the father of Dagmar and Herbie, and had 
shot himself in the study not six months before. 


10 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


'‘That’s what comes of not having a nurse,” sobbed 
Margaret. “They hear the most dreadful gos- 

_• 11 

sip- 

“Don’t cry, Margaret,” begged Dagmar. “Don’t 
cry, sweet Margaret. Herbie is a naughty boy, and 
I’ll go make him stop at once.” She set off impor¬ 
tantly, while Margaret Hallowell allowed her old 
friend to soothe her. 

A tawdry magnificence brooded in the old hallway 
with its wide spaces, its arches, and its great upward 
reach to the balconies of the third floor. Dust-cov¬ 
ered piles were everywhere—books, clothes, mis¬ 
placed furniture, tom newspapers. Garments, ripped 
to be made over by a sewing woman weeks before, 
lay accumulating their share of dirt beside the open, 
dust-swallowing sewing-machine. Sewing table and 
machine had been moved out into the hall when 
Aunt Etholla decided to move into the sewing-room. 
Dagmar walked along through it all, switching her 
skirts. To her, things had been this way “almost 
forever,” for she was already referring to the days 
before the death of her father as “When I was a 
little girl of five.” Aunt Etholla’s thin high voice 
came from the bed in the sewing-room: ‘ ‘ Dagmar, 

will you bring me a glass of water ? ” 

Dagmar pretended not to hear but went on down 
the wide, dusty staircase in search of Herbie. He 




DUSTY GRANDEUR 


ii 


was not in the room that had been her father’s study, 
and not in the long-unused room off the hall beyond. 
“Herbie!” she called, “Herbie!” through the great 
expanse of hushed, lonely rooms, rapidly graying 
with twilight. 

There was no answer save for the silent, inscru¬ 
table answer of the great high ceilings, the mystery of 
the awe-compelling quiet of the smoky receding 
walls. A portrait of her grandfather, Charles Mont¬ 
gomery, gazed down with its accustomed look of 
amusement from the shadows. Grandfather’s room ! 
Next to father’s room ! The wing of the dead ! For 
this part of the house had scarcely been entered, save 
by the children, for weeks. She shuddered, and 
called frantically, “Herbie, Herbie,” wanting to run, 
yet held by the thought of her young brother. She 
clinched her fists and ran around an ell, half expect¬ 
ing to see him lying dead there; but her fright sud¬ 
denly vanished as she came upon him, squatting, 
silent, very much alive with wide-open babyish eyes 
and a blank expression on his face. He was five, 
but very large for his age, and still unable to talk 
plainly; the gossips said he was overdeveloped 
physically and underdeveloped mentally. Dagmar 
stopped in front of him angrily: “Herbert Hallo- 
well, why didn’t you answer me? What are you sit¬ 
ting there by yourself for ? ” 


12 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“I’m fordettin’,” said Herbert, “so I tan sdare 
myself adain!” 

Dagmar remembered her errand. “Well, it’s very 
naughty to scare yourself about father. Margaret 
cried when I told her. You are not to do it again. 
Now, then, come with me.” 

Herbert took her hand obediently and they walked 
through the big rooms together. At the threshold 
of the study, he shrieked and threw himself on Dag¬ 
mar. It was not very successful, for he had not quite 
forgotten that the long, flimsy curtain, grayed by a 
season of dust, and slightly swaying in the draft of 
an imperfectly set window, was not really Paul’s 
ghost. He frightened Dagmar a little and they 
raced to the bottom of the stairs, arriving breathless 
and panting to come up behind Zedda, the maid. 

They mounted silently, conspirators, in the hope of 
frightening Zedda, who was dull-witted as well as 
near-sighted. Dagmar took two steps at a time, in a 
tremendous slinking movement, much envied by 
Herbie. 

“Who’s that?” Aunt Etholla’s voice crept into 
the corridor like a little living complaint. “It’s 
me,” said Zedda. 

“Uh-oh!” a delicate groan came from Aunt 
Etholla, exquisitely suffering, unheeded by her sister 
Margaret, by Dagmar, by Herbie, even by Zedda— 


DUSTY GRANDEUR 


13 


for the groan attempted to implicate the heavy- 
witted maid, though unsuccessfully. “No one’s 
been near me all day. I can hardly speak. I need 
water!” 

“Yes’m,” said Zedda. “You want me to git you 
glass water?” 

“Yes,” moaned the thin voice, as the invalid 
turned her thin figure restlessly. “Yes, Zedda. If 
you please, Zedda.” 

‘ ‘ Well, maybe, I kin, ’ ’ said Zedda doubtfully. She 
went on to Margaret Hallo well’s room and stood in 
the doorway. “You see, I was supposed to git tea 
to-day, Mrs. Hallo well. There ain’t nothin’ to git!” 

Margaret broke from an absorbing narration. ‘ ‘ I 
haven’t sent in my order to the grocery. What a 
nuisance!” 

“Don’t bother with tea, Margaret,” said Miriam, 
who, tired and hungry from a long, hard afternoon 
had been waiting eagerly for tea to be brought up. 

“Just bring up tea and thin bread and butter, 
Zedda,” said Margaret hastily. 

“We’re all out of tea, I told you yesterday, and 
there ain’t no bread,” said Zedda imperturbably. 
She turned and walked back to get the water for 
Etholla. 

“Please don’t bother,” entreated Miriam. 

“To think that Mollie would go off and leave us 


14 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


after all these years,” said Margaret. “I’m nearly 
crazy with all this work.” Yet she did not go to the 
telephone and call up her grocer. “It shows that 
there is no such thing as gratitude. Why, that cook 
has practically rim this house since mother died, and 
she cried as much when father died-” 

The children burst in. “Can we have tea, too, 
Margaret?” demanded Dagmar. Herbie threw him¬ 
self on the bed. 

Miriam shook her head sympathetically at Mar¬ 
garet. “I should think you’d sell your soul for a 
nurse.” 

Herbert burst into loud blubbering tears. “Oh, 
goodness!” exclaimed Margaret. “Now, you’ve 
started something. He cries whenever we mention 
Frieda. It just shows. I would have sworn that 
Frieda was devoted to the children-” 

“Margaret, Margaret,” said Miriam in tones of 
exasperation. “You don’t expect servants to re¬ 
main when you can’t pay them.” 

Since her husband’s death they had had one ser¬ 
vant in a house with twenty rooms. They did not 
live; they camped. Margaret’s room, the nursery, 
the kitchen, and a small reception-room down-stairs 
were islands in that huge house, from which they 
travelled back and forth. In between, dust spread 
over the accumulation of six months; and the chil- 




DUSTY GRANDEUR 


i5 


dren ran shrieking about the ghostly rooms, star¬ 
tling rats, displacing cobwebs, while Etholla lay on 
her bed and moaned about the villainy of Paul Hal¬ 
lowed in speculating with her money, and Margaret 
spent herself in emotional tears for her dead husband 
wdiile she practically made up her mind to marry the 
rich John Patlock. 

Nothing went on in that huge gray-stone pile but 
the nightly visits of John Patlock. And the town 
waited, suspended, to be horrified at the news that 
she was going to marry him before her husband had 
been dead six months. The drama of the sweeping 
away of the fortune Charles Montgomery had left 
to his two daughters, Etholla and Margaret, fol¬ 
lowed closely by the suicide of the guilty Paul Hal¬ 
lowed, was not enough. The gossips waited breath¬ 
lessly titillated by the several interesting moral 
debates: Resolved that Margaret Hallowed should 
forget her worthless husband and marry again. Re¬ 
solved that Margaret Hallowed should remain true 
to Paul in spite of his crime. 


CHAPTER TWO 

THE CURLED AND WEALTHY DARLINGS 


“The children, Dagmar and Herbie, shall be 
brought up to be very precious, very precious,” 
Grandfather Montgomery had said, tracing a gesture, 
suggestive of the decadent Romans — an elusive 
movement, apparently effortless, and very charac¬ 
teristic of him. “My own children,” he would sigh, 
“were always crude”; and then he would breathe 
gently—“their mother’s influence.” 

It was just after the birth of Herbie that he pro¬ 
nounced this resolution. The children were utterly 
dependent on him, for Paul Hallowell had been 
penniless. “Money doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mat¬ 
ter,” the charming old Montgomery had said, when 
his daughter married; and added: “Margaret has 
always been my little crooked kitten, and now she 
has caught a crooked mouse, so we’ll all live together 
in our little crooked house !” 

Margaret brought her little crooked mouse home 
and installed him in a suite of rooms. Paul Hallo- 
well was a very whimsical mouse, indeed, for he was 
six feet tall and, into the bargain, gangling. “A 
brilliant young chap,” Grandfather Montgomery 
had often told his friends. ‘ ‘ Doubtless he will bring 

16 


CURLED AND WEALTHY DARLINGS 17 

countless laurels into the family. I expect him to 
discover the answer to some of these questions which 
are causing such agitation in the breasts of the hurry¬ 
ing young; a chemical compound, the locale of hades, 
or something of equal importance. ” 

That the young invariably hurried was a conve¬ 
nient theory of Grandfather Montgomery’s, carrying 
the implicit picture of a once-energetic Charles Mont¬ 
gomery, and excusing him honorably from continu¬ 
ing the unpleasant exercise since he had yielded 
gracefully to the years. 

There was a crepuscular grandeur playing in the 
corridors of Grandfather Montgomery’s mind, and 
he had an ambition to have both of his daughters 
living with him in the house, each installed with a 
family in her own suite. When Margaret married 
the young Paul Hallo well, she was duly given three 
rooms of her own; a room was added when Dagmar 
arrived, and another one when Herbie came. 

Grandfather Montgomery then moved down-stairs 
into a room in which the family never breakfasted, 
but which was called The Breakfast Room. It 
looked off over the bluff and down the river, and 
had been his favorite spot for many years. Besides, 
it saved climbing stairs to sleep down there. It was 
in this room that the children’s dim memory placed 
their grandfather, and here that his portrait looked 


i8 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


down from the walls; here that he had hoped to exert 
his precious influence on their lives, and here that 
he had died. And now to the children he was less 
vivid than their father, whom they called Paul, and 
even he was fast losing his sense of reality to them in 
the more dominating figure of his own ghost. 

For not Grandfather Montgomery, not even Paul 
Hallo well, to whom the management of the remains 
of the Montgomery fortune had naturally fallen 
when Grandfather Montgomery died (leaving with 
characteristic negligence no will), was to exert any 
influence on the children. John Patlock, rapidly 
risen John Patlock, brought in his money, his pres¬ 
ence to the old home, and to the children of Mar¬ 
garet Hallo well. It was John Patlock who taught 
the children to say “Daddy’'—their own father had 
always been Paul to them. He, who lay on his back 
on the floor and let them climb over him, shrieking 
with delight, for Paul had never played with them. 
John Patlock it was who would run gaily to the piano, 
tossing out doggerel rhymes in Dagmar’s honor: 

“ Dag-mar! You are my bright star! 

You’re your daddy’s little girl! 

Sugar Plum, you got me going some-” 

“Heavens, John!” Margaret would look up from 
a book with deprecating brows. John would flush 
and turn from the piano, while Dagmar, clapping her 



CURLED AND WEALTHY DARLINGS 19 


hands and dancing about, would beg him to go on. 

John Patlock told them stories, too. Telling 
stories was much nicer than having them read out 
loud by a nurse, because you could always find out 
the most interesting things that you wanted to know 
by asking questions. And then there were John’s 
invisible overshoes. They were magical and when¬ 
ever he went out of the doors there they were, he 
said, on his feet keeping them warm and dry even 
in the coldest winter weather. They had been given 
to him by Prince Vladimer. 

Prince Vladimer and Dagmar had millions of 
secret adventures together that not even John Pat- 
lock knew about. The Prince was away at the wars 
most of the time and Dagmar wrote him every day 
on tiny pieces of pink paper from a little pad that 
she had asked Margaret to give her. She made 
little folded envelopes out of the paper and mailed 
the letters whenever she could slip away from the 
nurse on her way to school or on her daily walk at a 
little low mail-box on Summit Avenue. Once she 
was in despair because Prince Vladimer did not get 
a letter from her for nearly a week. The letters 
accumulated in the nursery and one awful night 
when Aunt Etholla was having dinner with the chil¬ 
dren, she found one of them and read it. 

Aunt Etholla was very fond of Herbie and some- 


20 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


times had supper with the children. She did not 
like Dagmar, the little girl thought, and always se¬ 
lected her as an audience for the most unpleasant 
anecdotes about her father. Betweefi Aunt Etholla 
and Herbie there was a curious resemblance. Some¬ 
thing in her long lackadaisical countenance seemed 
reminiscent of Herbie’s adenoids, which, though they 
had been out once, were growing in again. 

“Deerest Prinz Vladimer, ” read Aunt Etholla 
with difficulty. Dagmar had learned from John 
Patlock how to spell Vladimer correctly. “The 
royel majesty has been insulting me again. I sed 
wate til you come back, and tossing back my goldan 
curls I glode down the marble halls. Pleese return 
soon. Your loving sweetheart, Dagmar. ” 

“H’m, ” said Aunt Etholla. “Boys on your mind 
already. And only nine years old. Just like your 
mother! ” 

For the first time Dagmar noticed the slip of paper 
in her aunt’s hand. 

Yesterday, Dagmar thought, when I was crossing 
the bridge I was afraid I might slip through and go 
down, down, down into the water. Why didn’t I ? 
Why didn’t I die yesterday before this happened ? 
The furniture in the room suddenly blurred, though 
she was not crying, and she seemed suspended in 
nothing. Then her feet felt heavy, and something 


CURLED AND WEALTHY DARLINGS 21 


was creeping up to her knees, something heavy and 
horrible—up, up, up, until she was engulfed in a 
flood of shame so agonizing that she unconsciously 
clinched her hands and raised them from her body 
where they hung, to beat them slowly back and forth 
in the air. 

The green walls of the nursery, unfamiliar sud¬ 
denly, closed on her, then receded until she could see 
once more the white, straight crisp curtains at the 
windows moving in slow time at the bidding of the 
soft summer breeze. Outside in the top of the big 
tree the leaves stirred with fragile intimate sighs, and 
the big placid eyes of Herbie, who sat stupidly at the 
little table with his mouth open, watched her un- 
comprehendingly. 

She looked up at last into the long, terrible face of 
Aunt Etholla, wondering whether this agony was to 
last forever. 

“A little girl like you, to be crazy about a boy!” 
said Aunt Etholla with scornful amusement. 

And at that moment Dagmar knew that this was 
the most shameful thing that a little girl could do: 
be crazy about a boy. For nights after that she lay 
in bed on the sleeping porch trying not to think of 
Prince Vladimer and the beautiful little house they 
had together. For Etholla had interrupted an en¬ 
chanting dream that had hardly begun, and which 



22 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


had promised to last night after night for weeks. 
In this dream, which began the moment Dagmar got 
into bed and lasted until she fell asleep, she and the 
Prince played together at housekeeping all day long 
with no grown-ups about. 

It seemed like a long desperate struggle to Dag¬ 
mar, this not thinking about her playmate, but at last 
she had to confess to herself that she was too weak 
to resist, and the Prince came stealthily back into 
her consciousness, bringing with him the most de¬ 
lightful adventures, until finally Dagmar forgot that 
it was wrong to think of him. 

It was only a few weeks after this incident that 
Margaret gave her sister a trip to Europe, which she 
spent mostly at watering-places, telling her history 
to the sympathetic semi-invalids she met and read¬ 
ing the new novels by Elinor Glyn and Myrtle Reed. 
Etholla missed Herbie and told innumerable point¬ 
less anecdotes about him: “My little nephew used 
to slide down the banisters. ‘ Well! ’ I said to him, 

‘ aren’t you afraid you’ll fall ? ’ ‘ Oh, no ! ’ he said ! ” 

Her invariable remark at any meal was: “Father 
always took milk in his tea. He said the English 
call cream bad form!” Similar remarks filled all 
conversational gaps nicely for Etholla, except in 
confidential moments, moments of high friendship, 
when she would say: “A dear friend of mine once 


CURLED AND WEALTHY DARLINGS 23 

told me that he hated fat women. ” She would grow 
very red and look slightly complacent, for in spite of 
her forty-five years, Etholla still thought of herself 
as eligible for matrimony, and held all the notions 
of propriety current thirty years ago. 

This dear friend, she told one or two of these 
casual intimates, was a man whom she just couldn’t 
bring herself to marry. “It wasn’t that I didn’t 
love him. I just couldn’t somehow bring myself—” 
here Etholla looked unutterable lewd delicacies. 

The truth was that Etholla had been jilted. Up 
to the age of twenty-six she had, though indolent by 
nature, managed to keep out of bed at least part of 
the day, sustained by the belief that a certain man 
intended ultimately to marry her. 

But when, after a few halting explanations about 
not wanting an invalid wife, he had married a plump 
and energetic blonde, she had taken up the congenial 
life-work of family invalid. 

In the early days there had been a moderate 
amount of sympathy for Etholla and her broken 
heart. Her father had said with unwonted energy 
that the fellow deserved to be horsewhipped, de¬ 
served to be horsewhipped, deserved to be—ho-hum 
horsewhipped. Mr. Montgomery, stretching himself 
indolently before the fire on that crisp morning 
twenty years ago, had had no idea of performing this 


24 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


traditional operation on the recalcitrant lover him¬ 
self. It was just his extreme amiability and desire 
to make Etholla feel his sympathy. 

“Though I really can’t imagine why you should 
care, ” he had gone on to say, crossing his ankles and 
stretching the muscles of his back like the connoisseur 
in comfort that he was. “It’s your industry, your 
industry, the fatal disease of America. Here you 
are snug and cosy as can be, yet you feel this strange 
gnawing to get out of the home nest, out of the home 
nest. Away! Be careful, my dear girl, be careful 
of the modern effort to rush at things. ” 

Etholla had been careful for twenty years now, 
and had rushed at nothing. The family doctor had 
told her, and the more unsympathetic members of her 
family, that just one thing ailed her: ‘‘She’s lazy. ’’ 
There was something peculiarly offensive to 
Etholla in the way he rolled the word around in his 
mouth and ejected it violently. It seemed to cause 
divers unnecessary motions of the jaw. “Layee- 
zee ! ’ ’ She called in another and more sympathetic 
doctor. And another, and another, and then, heal¬ 
ers and osteopaths, and chiropractors and seers. 
People who prayed for her, and people who pum¬ 
melled her. But she remained complacently ill. 
The industry which the amiable Mr. Montgomery 
had discerned hovering, never descended. 


CHAPTER THREE 


SIXTEEN 

“I’ll die if I’m not engaged by the time I’m six¬ 
teen,” said Dagmar. It was at this period and 
during an Easter vacation from boarding-school 
which she spent with Margaret and John Patlock at 
Virginia Hot Springs that she saved herself from the 
dismal catastrophe of being described as a drab 
blonde by having her hair treated to a henna rinse. 
The war was going on and her head was a jumble of 
Lieutenants, Captains, Jackies, Yanks, Devil Dogs. 
She was very patriotic, enjoying the war hysteria to 
the point of fainting at the news of the death of a 
St. Paul boy whom she had known slightly, but 
allowed the girls at school to believe her engaged to. 

John Patlock still took her on his lap and shouted, 
“She’s my Dagmar, she’s my girl,” but she was 
growing a tall mysterious person, whose eyes hinted 
nuances of mood behind their blue cloudiness. 

She was sixteen, the armistice was signed, and she 
was secretly engaged in a priggish and disappointing 
way. It occurred the summer before, during the 
long lazy vacation while she baked herself at a place 

known as the lake, that year she admitted to herself 

25 


26 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


that her deepest interest lay in the five or six boys 
she knew who, because they seemed superior to the 
rest, often for trifling reasons, were classified as 
interesting or, in cases of extreme attractiveness, 
different. 

She was engaged to Raymond, chiefly because he 
had a fraternity pin to give her. Raymond, pre¬ 
cariously jiggling in the process of respecting Dagmar 
like the yolk of an egg in its albumen, was much 
admired by the mothers and not particularly prized 
by the young women of his own age. Raymond was 
twenty. “He’s interesting because he’s older,” 
Dagmar explained. 

Raymond played the ukelele and took her for 
canoe rides. He said things like: “Have you ever 
heard this one ? Oh, that reminds me of a good song ! 
Now I’ll play your favorite!” But most of the 
time he let the canoe rest easily on its cool silky bed 
of water while he strummed and sang. 

One summer evening, when the last florescent lights 
were drifting through the west and melting into the 
clear blue shadows, Raymond asked in a slightly 
whining and somewhat timorous voice what she 
would do if he should kiss her. Dagmar, leaning 
back in the inevitable but graceful discomfort of a 
canoe, replied with the dignity proper to an occasion 
about which she had spent many hours of specula- 


SIXTEEN 


27 


tion, overlaid by a feeling of disappointment that it 
was not more romantic. 

“I think,” said Dagmar, “that I should slap 
you.” She had got this from a favorite novel which 
had transformed her temporarily into the charming 
and hoydenish heroine. Regret flooded the scene 
with the strange deep flavor of lost beauty. If 
only Raymond had looked differently, if only he 
had commanded, if only she could melt to his 
kiss like those girls who in doing this on paper 
thrilled her unbearably. At this time she read all 
beauty supplements and columns of advice to per¬ 
sons with love problems. They all assured her that 
she would be correct in refusing to kiss Raymond. 
She wondered at a feeling taking possession of her, 
puzzling and interesting her, yet, because she did not 
like Raymond very much, she wanted to repel a 
little. 

Raymond was dipping his fingers into the water 
and meditating. 

“Do you administer many such slaps ?” 

The word administer aroused Dagmar’s admira¬ 
tion. The conversation was grown-up and piquant. 
She felt elated as she answered: “No, most of the 
boys I have known have been gentlemen ! ’ ’ 

Raymond was impressed. He looked ashamed. 
Dagmar noticed his flushed cheeks and wondered at 


28 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


the quickened pulse beating in her own blood. She 
imagined it to be a sixth sense which she had devel¬ 
oped and which no one else possessed, giving her a 
special key as to whether she interested individual 
men or not. 

Raymond served his purpose in boarding-school 
and faded from her life. She remembered him al¬ 
ways with a sensation like the forgotten taste of un¬ 
pleasant medicine. But at school she wondered 
silently about the unfamiliar feelings he had roused 
in her, lying out straight in her white iron bed while 
her roommate slumbered across the room, or per¬ 
haps lay thinking her own secret thoughts. Some¬ 
times she would reconstruct the scene in the canoe 
with Prince Vladimer leaning tenderly forward, his 
strong young face tense with interest in the ques¬ 
tion. She would go about her studies dreamily for 
days, thinking of the Prince who had come to America 
and was now attending Harvard University, until 
one day she thought of being ill and going to the 
infirmary to lie in peace for a few days. Puzzling 
the doctor, worrying the schoolmistress, it was evi¬ 
dent that the family laziness was developing in her. 
At Christmas she was so far behind in her studies 
that her mother was advised that on account of 
Dagmar’s fragile health it would be best for her to 
stay out of school the following term. 


SIXTEEN 


29 


Finely wrought, chaste and sensitive-looking, Dag- 
mar at sixteen had a heart divided in allegiance 
between the dream figure of her beautiful mother 
and that of Prince Vladimer. And over and through 
it all ran a splendid dream of Dagmar, grown up, 
doing something magnificent, which would make 
both of them proud of her, and would set her apart 
always to all people as she was now set apart to her¬ 
self. Dagmar returned from school glowing with 
eagerness for this figure of maternal tenderness 
which had been magical in its power to soothe and 
comfort her at school. 

For the first few days she followed Margaret about 
the house, an adoring child. The mother-and-child 
relation was infiltrated with an unsubstantial fe¬ 
licity, until the inherent selfishness of each began to 
reassert itself and they quarrelled like two children. 
Margaret at thirty-five looked ten years younger. 
She was absorbed in the social orbit in which she 
moved, and a strongly developed histrionic nature, 
indulged by years of ingenious scenes which con¬ 
trived to put John Pat lock in the wrong in most 
domestic disagreements, made it easy for her to drop 
into the role of the saintly mother abandoned after 
years of care by a heartless daughter. And Dag¬ 
mar, inheriting her mother’s imagination, dropped as 
easily into the character of the devoted child return- 


30 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


ing home to the calloused, world-worn, unloving 
mother. Both wept honest tears; Dagmar’s were 
passionately genuine, for she had hoped that her 
mother would explain many things to her that she 
wanted to know and stand somehow between her and 
the loneliness that she believed herself unique in 
feeling. She had imagined deliciously even con¬ 
fiding about Prince Vladimer, but that, in her bitter¬ 
ness, she could only be glad she had never done. 

The quarrels and the tears passed like summer 
showers, leaving their mark, however, on Dagmar. 
The absorbing world in which each lived claimed 
each of them. So their touching rings met only to 
part with gentle explosions, like two floating disks 
on a languid pool in accidental collision. 

In Margaret’s bedroom, hopelessly out of keeping 
with the rest of the architecture of the house, were 
eight French windows, tall and dignified as eight 
seventeenth-century ladies entering a ballroom. They 
let the sun in every morning, lighting up the gray 
shaded to lavender, and lavender shaded to gray 
room where Margaret slept, her black hair an untidy 
mass on the pillow, and approximately fifteen articles 
of clothing scattered in gay and dainty patches over 
the painted furniture and silk cushions. 

At nine each morning Margaret breakfasted in 
bed. She was awakened earlier to her annoyance 


SIXTEEN 


3i 


each day by the sound of John plunging around in 
the bath. The disquieting thought that he was un¬ 
pleasantly bathing in cold water made her uneasy, 
and each morning she lay indulging in disgust as she 
listened to his activities at his toilet. Dozing and 
waking gradually, often with a bad taste in her 
mouth from smoking too many cigarettes or drink¬ 
ing too many cocktails, she would wish that she 
could lie in bed forever, though the sound of John 
talking in a loud tone in his bedroom to no one in 
particular caused a frown to gather between her 
sleepy brows. 

“Suffering Smith!” why did he drawl out his 
h’s so ? “Why can’t a single member of this family 
get down to breakfast? Lot of lazy girls in this 
house!” 

Margaret turned over in bed. John was so dreary, 
so wearying. If she could only go to New York! 
The town was horrible in its dulness. Why hadn’t 
she insisted on going to Europe this year? John 
could perfectly well afford it, she assured herself ill- 
naturedly. 

The maid entered and put down her breakfast 
tray on the little enamel table that swung over her 
bed. At least, she thought, attacking her grape¬ 
fruit with relish, they had a good cook. She began 
to feel better and, when the telephone rang, she 


32 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


reached over and took the European phone from 
her table very agreeably. 

It was her friend Miriam Thorpe. They talked 
for an hour and a quarter: The cookies had given 
out yesterday at Betty Hamilton’s tea for the return 
soldiers. Really for the hoys the Hamiltons might 
just for once forget their parsimony. Elsa Saunders’s 
cloth-of-gold gown was getting tawdry. She had 
worn it to everything that season- 

Most of it was about the desultory activities which 
Margaret had lately been engaging in of welcoming 
the soldier boys and the sailor boys who passed 
through town on their way home from the war. 
Every afternoon she lent a motor to bring a carload of 
them from the railroad station to the home of one of 
her friends, where tea was served, at which she often 
assisted. Young girls played violins or sang sweet 
little songs for the edification of the transient heroes. 

When Miriam rang off, Margaret called another 
number, and repeated approximately everything that 
she had said to Miriam. This went on for another 
hour. 

“ Margaret,” said Dagmar, “do you intend to use 
that phone all morning!” She had come into the 
room without knocking, in her pajamas, yawning 
and stretching. 

“Dear me!” said Margaret into the telephone. 



SIXTEEN 


33 


“Well, Anice, I won’t keep you any longer. Hope 
I’ll see you soon !” She had hurried her last words 
until she snapped out the last sentence, then turned 
to Dagmar with a grieved expression. 

“Well, Margaret, every single morning it’s the 
same thing. Not a person in the house can use the 
phone, and as for expecting to get a call from any 
one!’’ She shruggingly indicated the impossibility 
of hoping to achieve a telephone call. 

Margaret was gently sad and dignified, as she 
always fancied herself as being with Dagmar. “I’m 
very sorry to put you out, dear,” she said. 

“But, Margaret!” Dagmar’s tone was one of ex¬ 
asperation. “Don’t you realize how hard it is in a 
big family for one person to be at the telephone for 
three hours straight! ’ ’ 

Dagmar exaggerated characteristically. Hoping 
to impress Margaret with the enormity of her selfish¬ 
ness, she only impressed Margaret with her own inac¬ 
curacy. 

In a moment they were arguing as only two angry 
women can argue. Dagmar was sobbingly relating 
how happy she had been until Margaret’s ill temper 
upset her, and Margaret was telling the moving but 
often-times repeated story of how she loved Dagmar 
more than any one in the world and would make any 
sacrifice for her. And Dagmar was understanding, 


34 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


though Margaret did not say it and had never said 
it, that she meant that she had married John Pat- 
lock for Dagmar’s sake. 

They were reconciled with the agreeable tears that 
were part of Margaret’s superabundant emotional 
outlet. When Dagmar had gone, Margaret sighed 
and went to her desk. Seating herself on the absurd 
gray-cushioned and panelled chair that stood before 
it, she wrote on some very fetching French station¬ 
ery the following surprising lines: 

“ My dear: 

Curiously enough I am not unhappy. I have 
promised myself not to think of you, but perhaps I 
have not quite managed that. It has been three 
days since you telephoned and a week since I have 
seen you. Can you ever know how hurt I am ? I 
think not, for you are incapable of a deep”—she 
hesitated with tears in her eyes and wrote—‘ ‘ friend¬ 
ship such as I have given you.” 

Over and over I go in the same old round. I wish 
that I were a Catholic so that I could live in a 
cloister. There, serene from all the world and its 
harried activities, I would rest. Rest and dream 
my days away. Dreams of—many things. But— 
heigho—” She paused and looked at the clock, saw 
that it was time to dress for luncheon, and so, adding 
one more line—“I can write no more”—she signed 


SIXTEEN 


35 


herself “M,” addressed an envelope lined with 
paper the color of a sirloin of beef to one of the 
more independent young bachelors living at the 
University Club, and rose from her desk. She had 
done with the emotion, sincere while it lasted, of the 
letter. But now a deeper interest brought forth all 
her powers of concentration, for she was about to 
start on the art she loved, the cultivation and care 
of her beauty. 

On her way to luncheon she stopped for Miriam 
Thorpe. They rolled smoothly down the boulevard, 
re-exclaiming the same things they had discussed 
over the telephone. They were launched on their 
day, sitting importantly, looking down casually at 
people on the street. 

At the patriotic tea that afternoon, Dagmar, much 
excited by the event, stood in the crowd looking at 
the boys who stood uneasily about, showing broad 
embarrassed smiles to every one who met their 
glances. Many of them, by their gawky bashful¬ 
ness and uncomfortable appearance, flattered their 
hostesses into thinking of themselves naively as high 
society. These eighteen-year-olds had come from 
farms and small villages for short terms in military 
camps. Few of them had been overseas, but all pos¬ 
sessed the obscure dignity of potential Guy Empeys. 

They listened, awed by their surroundings, tinged 


36 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


with unconscious boredom, to a young girl perform¬ 
ing on a violin. Margaret, closing her eyes as if 
overcome by the magic of music, opened them to 
say as the number was finished: “Ah, Heifitz, Hei¬ 
fitz!” 

“Heifitz!” exclaimed Miriam Thorpe in her 
hearty voice. “What do you mean Heifitz ! ” 

“Jascha Heifitz,” said Margaret with a frown of 
annoyance between her brows. “I heard him play 
that in-” 

“Who’s he ?” demanded Miriam. 

Margaret’s voice had a remarkable timbre of mel¬ 
ancholy. It went out from her to ripple on alone, 
lonely, unheeded, to break to bits against the harsh 
unresponsive surfaces of people. “Heifitz,” she 
said in her extraordinary diapason of sad tones, ‘ ‘ is 
the world’s greatest violinist!” 

Miriam was unimpressed. She made a twisted 
grimace with her mouth. “Look at Dagmar,” she 
said, “over there, talking to that good-looking boy.” 

“He’s one of the Bennetts,” said Margaret. “I 
didn’t know he had been in the war. I must go 
and find out about him.” 

Miriam turned back to her duties of being nice to 
the men in uniform. “The only touch of culture, 
probably,” she said to herself, “that the pathetic 
creatures will get in all their starved lives.” 



SIXTEEN 


37 


Sipping tea, in the uniform of the Royal Flying 
Corps, a young lieutenant with a wound chevron 
on his sleeve had looked at Dagmar with gay mis¬ 
chievous blue eyes, and proceeded to relate a record 
of heroisms in the wars never before equalled by a 
boy of eighteen. Dagmar was completely swayed, 
melted into his narrative as he went on, shaking his 
boyish head carelessly at her awed, low exclamations. 

He had fallen, he said, from a burning plane, and 
wakened to an agony worse than death to find him¬ 
self on an operating-table. Through grinding tor¬ 
ture his back-bone was being wrenched back into 
place. . . . Dagmar’s eyes blurred with tears as she 
looked at his firm young back. ‘‘Say, listen,” he 
said suddenly, “that’s all a fake. I’ve never been 
to war. I’m too young !” 

In amazed confusion Dagmar stared at him. It 
had all been a game and she hadn’t known it. Her 
wistfulness was rapidly sliding back inside of her 
and anger was taking possession of her visibly. “I 
didn’t mean,” he went on awkwardly. “You know, 

I read that in a book. I didn’t think-” 

It was at this point that Margaret joined them. 
“Well, young Mr. Bennett,” said Margaret gaily. 
Margaret had a way of knowing all young men. 
“Where did you get that uniform ?” 

“Borrowed it for the party,” he told her impu- 



38 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


dently. “It’s a slick party, by the way—a little 
dull, though. I must be going before any one else 
spots me.” 

He left while Dagmar was still dwelling in the 
rush of emotions that his narrative had called up. 
And just before dinner, while she dawdled on the 
stairs, still deep in them, she saw a thing which filled 
her young idealism with ice-cold horror. 

Lester Thorpe, the husband of Miriam, had 
dropped in on his way home and ridden up to the 
house with them in Margaret’s electric, as Miriam 
had gone on home with his car. He came in, and for 
a time he and Margaret had sat in front of the fire in 
the great hallway in a kind of intimate silence which 
Margaret called up in the presence of men. On 
leaving he had kissed Margaret, a light tender kiss, 
but infinitely full of meaning to Dagmar who saw it 
from the stairs where they had not known she was. 

That night Dagmar did not come down to dinner. 
Instead, she lay on the window-seat in her room look¬ 
ing down over the valley at the flats, like a bottom¬ 
less cavern filled to the brim with folds of soft gray 
smoke. The lights were already twinkling in a hun¬ 
dred homes, coming up invincibly through the mist 
as if challenging the darkness. 

Chill with misery, Dagmar sought for an explana¬ 
tion of her mother’s kiss. Perhaps she has fallen in 


SIXTEEN 


39 


love with Mr. Thorpe and can’t help herself. Per¬ 
haps they are going to elope. She swelled with pity 
for John. Ought she to tell him ? But she shrank 
from that. 

At last she crept into bed. Perhaps, after all, it 
meant nothing. But she knew better. Her body 
twisted in bed, thinking how horrible it was, how un¬ 
natural and repulsive. She loathed Margaret and 
sprang to her feet in the darkness of her bedroom. 
The feeling in her was as unbearable as seeing one’s 
dearest possession burned. If only something would 
give her back her mother. 

She flung herself on the window-seat again and 
looked out over the low ruffled sea that the valley 
below her was, each wave touched unevenly with 
phosphorus. 

A peace came to her as she thought: “After all, I’m 
only a silly little girl. I don’t know anything. I 
ought to trust my own mother.” Then the thought 
came to her: “Did I think Margaret was bad?” 
She rejected it with the violence that meant she 
had been subconsciously thinking this. The world 
seemed unclean again. Beneath her was a chasm 
like the valley out there, deeper than the valley. 
Looking out, she imagained it to be bottomless and 
strung with a filet of lights, over which she must 
dance like a tight-rope walker on her perilous journey 


40 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


through life. From point to point of the golden net¬ 
work, sickened every moment with the awful dread 
of falling. 

She leaned against the hard cushions and closed 
her eyes. Suddenly it was daylight, early morning; 
and she was walking, bright with the lightness of 
happiness, over a grass-grown plane. Ahead of her 
was her destination, a lovely spot hidden by bloom¬ 
ing lilacs, and she pushed confidently toward it. 
Parting the flowering bushes, she emerged to a hard 
sandy table which dropped into a valley, a deep 
black valley; and five feet down, with his feet on the 
out jutting branch of a tree, she saw the boy she had 
met at tea that afternoon. He looked at her with 
young imploring eyes, and she saw that he was 
clinging to the sandy top of the cliff with all his 
might, unable to get sufficient hold to pull himself 
up. 

In a moment she had clasped him by the forearm 
and he had put his arms up to grasp her. They 
looked with anguish at each other and she knew 
suddenly that the branch on which he stood was 
breaking. Slowly, slowly it cracked and in one more 
moment he would have nothing to keep him from 
falling but her arms. “You cannot hold me, said 
his eyes, but will you come with me ? ” 

Go down into that black horrible place ? Why, 


SIXTEEN 


4i 


this was the edge of the world! If she went she 
would never walk again on that bright pleasant hill¬ 
top. “Good-by, then,” said his eyes, and before she 
could make up her mind his clasp had loosened and 
he had plunged. 

Oh, why didn’t he wait one moment more and she 
would have known! She wanted to go down, and 
down, and down, clasped in his arms. With a shriek 
which woke her she plunged after him, and sat trem¬ 
bling and blinking, erect on the hard window-seat, 
wondering and troubled by her dream. 


CHAPTER FOUR 


THE EXPERIMENT 

“The question is,” said Dagmar to herself, “do 
they like you better if you do or you don’t ?” 

She sat, cross-legged, on a big chair in front of the 
fire gravely considering it. On her lap lay a maga¬ 
zine containing an explanation, only partially satis¬ 
factory, yet bringing some balm, of her mother’s 
behavior. A nation-wide publicity was being given 
to what was called the flapper. Stories and articles 
were being written to prove that all girls of this day 
were astonishingly different from any girls bom in 
any previous age. Dagmar held such a document 
in her lap. It said that these girls, among other 
surprising activities, actually kissed men. 

“Men seem to like Margaret,” reasoned Dagmar. 
“And she does.” Her physical repulsion to the 
idea was dying slowly. Margaret had always been 
criticised, she knew, for being in the mode with the 
younger generation. If that was all the kiss had 
meant, Dagmar did not blame her mother greatly. 
She was proud that her mother was beautiful and 
fashionable. Certainly she would rather have her 

42 


THE EXPERIMENT 


43 


be that way than like Aunt Etholla. “And I my¬ 
self would rather be like Margaret than like Aunt 
Etholla. ” She nodded slowly into the fire, which 
spurted unexpectedly with a tiny flame, the color of 
gold overlaid with silver and interpenetrated with 
lavender. A slow excitement was taking possession 
of her. “I’m going to experiment and find out 
whether they really like you more or less if you kiss 
them, ” she thought. 

This generation, Dagmar read, was for reasons, 
sometimes laid to the war, sometimes laid to suf¬ 
frage, and sometimes to a thing called unrest, free 
from all the trammels that had held its grandmothers. 
Dagmar inferred from all this that if she wanted to 
be popular it would be well to step in line with her 
generation. And she did want to be popular. She 
wanted above all things to have boys like her. 

Perhaps not above all things did she want this. 
There was in the background of her mind the tre¬ 
mendous personal achievement that lay in the world 
waiting for her, which she would some day happen 
upon and perform. For this she would receive an 
unlimited supply of laurels and would be cheered 
with unceasing violence which would remain al¬ 
ways in her life like a shout echoing through corridor 
after corridor of a mammoth cave. Sometimes she 
dreamed of herself before a vast acclaiming audience. 


44 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


If she could only go on the stage and call herself 
Dagmar Dauntless, or something striking. She 
thought that she would select some color—say, red 
or purple, and never dress in anything else. Once 
she had a brilliant scheme which she was sure would 
make her into a popular actress overnight: she 
would always dress in a Mephistopheles costume. 
For the street, a black one, severely tailored with the 
cape short and jaunty, and horns coming out of a 
small flat hat. A red-velvet one for afternoon teas, 
and in the evening striking gowns of red or black 
with floating tulle or spangled net for capes, and a 
head-dress with horns, all carrying out the idea of a 
devil. A wonderful way in which to attract atten¬ 
tion, Dagmar had confided to Margaret, who had 
agreed, but still sent to London for plain English 
school dresses for her. 

“I am changing, ” thought Dagmar seriously. “I 
am no longer the girl I was. I used to be so sweet 
and pure!” She sighed as she thought of her tre¬ 
mendous sophistication. “I am on the bridge now 
where the brook and river meet. The road before 
me divides, and I’m going to develop into one sort of 
girl or another presently. One sort of girl I may be 
may look back on these days with a shudder and feel 
ashamed at my silliness. Another girl I may develop 
into may laugh at these qualms of conscience I am 


THE EXPERIMENT 


45 


going through and think: ‘Well, you were a first- 
class imbecile to take it all so seriously !’ ” A pain 
shot sharply at her heart as she thought of her 
present self lost in the future. “Oh, but I hope I 
never lose my sympathy for the girl I am now, no 
matter what I become. ” 

A histrionic ecstasy possessed her, and her eyes 
filled with tears as she thought of herself so young, 
so unkissed, so romantically chaste: an ideal heroine. 
She would never murmur breathlessly at her real 
lover: “That’s the first time I’ve ever been kissed.” 
It was a great pity, a great sacrifice, but it was neces¬ 
sary to have boys like you. The impish face of Palo- 
mon Bennett strayed across her vision and she smiled 
as she thought of murmuring that phrase at him. 
What in the world would he do ? He’d think she was 
crazy. No, if she let him kiss her he must never 
guess he was the first one. 

Imperceptibly her thoughts drifted to the after¬ 
noon before, when she and Pal had walked slowly 
across the room in which she sat, swinging hands. 
She felt the rush of the warm air as they came in 
from the matinee, the heat of the bright crackling 
fire, the spacious welcome of the old mellow hallway, 
and in her mouth she fancied again the taste of the 
little cakes they had had for tea. The soft winter 
light had fed the window with its dying rays, and 


46 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


tinged the fine old rugs with the life that all the room 
seemed to have possessed. The books looked down 
smilingly from the tall white shelves like gracious 
grenadiers stationed to watch the charming love 
episode of a queen. And the hothouse flowers in the 
fat high vases expanded and glowed with color al¬ 
most artificial, like the smooth face of a sixteen-year- 
old garnished with rouge. 

And she and Pal, with joined hands, had walked 
with a certain tender young merriness across the 
room to the door. She smiled as she remembered 
that he had drawn her hand up to his lips and she 
had pulled it away, saying, that a man should always 
bend over a woman’s hand. 

“The respect theory sort of dwindles and dwin¬ 
dles, ” said Dagmar, reflecting that he was coming to 
see her again that afternoon. “And if I do let him, 
and he should lose his respect for me it won’t matter 
as much as if he were a St. Paul boy, because he’s 
going back to his mother in Chicago pretty soon 
anyway. ” 

This thought was depressing in a blurred, almost 
unrecognizable way. She got up and went over to 
the window and stood looking out. Motor-cars in 
their incredible busyness hustled by on the avenue. 
In the dull February air the houses across the street 
were dumb-looking, as so many tombstones. “This 


THE EXPERIMENT 


47 


is a dull town, ” thought Dagmar. “They ought to 
take me south or some place. It’s bad for my health 
this weather. ’ ’ She went back to the fire and curled 
up once more, this time in two huge comfortable 
chairs. She lay dozing and dreaming the rest of the 
morning, untroubled by any desire for activity, con¬ 
scious that she was staying out of school that winter 
to rest. 

“In the interest of science,” wrote Dagmar a day 
or two later, to her friend, Ann Orr, at school, “I 
have allowed myself to be kissed. I told you I had 
decided to try this experiment on Pal, who is terribly 
attractive. Well, my dear, I did. 

“The main thing I wanted to know, of course, was 
—did a boy like a girl worse or better when she let 
him kiss her . My dear, I can’t wait to tell you. 
Pal is the kind that needs to work for what he gets. 
He appreciates it more if he has to work for it. 

“So one night when he came, I let him hold my 
hand , and the next time he came, I didn’t. That 
mystified him. I think it’s a woman’s duty to be 
sort of mysterious. And when he came to say good 
night he fought strenuously to keep the ground he 
had gained —to kiss my hand. I let him do it. That 
night he proved he had not lost his respect for me by 
asking me to a party. Margaret would not let me 
go. She says I am too young, darn it. ” 


48 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Dagmar sighed as she let herself down for a mo¬ 
ment from her overpowering emotion, then took a 
fresh grip on her pen and hastily wrote nine pages 
of conversation between herself and Pal, overcast 
slightly with not quite truthful flattery from Pal to 
her. Not that she put any falsehoods in Pal’s 
mouth, but the interpretations of pauses, the over¬ 
emphasis of certain phrases, conveyed, not so much 
to Ann Orr, who, of course, saw through it, but to 
Dagmar herself, a highly satisfactory romantic epi¬ 
sode. And this was in spite of the fact that she 
had tried to give it a scientific cast. . . tell 

me now, I said. ” This was page twelve. “He said 
he would tell me some time, that it was awfully nice, 
but he didn’t know how I would take it if he told 
me now. He was caressing my hair with his cheek. 
His lips were only about three (crossed out and two 
written above it)—inches away from mine. I lifted 
mine about one inch and he kissed me. ” 

Dagmar stopped and gnawed her pen rapturously. 
After all, perhaps she ought not to write and tell 
Ann about it. “Already you are slipping, ” she told 
herself sternly. “You must not fall in love with a 
mere experiment.” But it would be rather nice if 
she fell in love with Pal. Then her first kiss wouldn’t 
be wasted. She could go back to those old dreams 
again in which Prince Vladimer had exclaimed some- 


THE EXPERIMENT 


49 


thing like, “Oh, God, at last, at last, ” when her first 
kiss slipped from her lips to his. Pal, she reflected, 
had said nothing. All he had probably thought was: 
“Well, I’ve kissed her.” She knew that she had 
thought nothing but: “Well, he kissed me.” They 
had stood looking at each other with shy little 
smiles in bewildered emotion, waking them to slight 
dizziness. 

“Pal,” she went on, “has liked me ten times as 
much since ! This morning he sent me a huge bunch 
of the most gorgeous roses I ever saw. ” She had no 
sense of dishonesty in describing an ordinary florist’s 
order of a dozen roses in this way. She was very 
happy as the scene of the arrival of the flowers that 
morning presented itself. John Patlock’s hearty 
teasing remarks, Margaret’s quizzical surprise in 
which Dagmar fancied a newly interested maternal 
approval. 

It was a great discovery to have made: that boys 
liked you better if you kissed them and did not lose 
their respect for you. After all, it would be best to 
send the letter on to Ann, because it would be selfish 
to keep this discovery all to herself. At this time 
she looked at all girls on the streets, the women she 
met in her mother’s drawing-room, speculating as to 
whether they knew this secret. She classified them 
all as Aunt Etholla’s or Margarets and was glad 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


50 

that she had definitely decided upon being a Mar¬ 
garet. 

Days and nights were permeated with the presence 
of the handsome blond boy Palomon Bennett. 
Mornings were long dreamy luxuries in which the 
Pal of the night before became even more real as she 
relived the conversations and incidents of his visit. 
Afternoons and evenings when she did not see him 
were so much blurred scenery passing before her 
eyes, while his image stood always beside her, and 
she introduced him into conversations in a way to 
rouse caustic comment from Aunt Etholla. 

“I don’t care,” said Dagmar, when she had not 
seen the young man for three days, and was therefore 
doubly eager to talk of him, “I like Palomon Ben¬ 
nett. ” 

“Like him,” answered Etholla bitterly. “I think 
you do ! Any one can see, without trying, that you 
are crazy about him !” 

Dagmar felt the old sense of shame descending 
over her. She went up to her room and sat think¬ 
ing doubtfully. Etholla’s remark had crystallized 
an increasing sense of depression, for Pal had not 
telephoned her for three days. After all, after all, 
had the experiment been a success ? Never had she 
been so happy as in these last weeks, happy in her love 
which was not returned, said a biting inner voice. 


THE EXPERIMENT 


5i 


The dull blue sky had been suddenly infused with 
a sullen gray. The first rain of the season began 
unexpectedly and violently to fall. On the roof over 
the kitchen Dagmar watched the threadlike water, 
thickening here and there to glassy ropes, plunge, to 
rise elastically in feathery explosions. In the dis¬ 
tance the valley looked newly washed and strikingly 
distinct in contrast to the muddy, unhappy-looking 
sky. 

Cheapness. That word, divined from Aunt Eth- 
olla, in some way made its triumphant path into 
Dagmar’s consciousness. Every one knew that she 
was crazy about Pal, and Pal was not in the least in 
love with her. This, as she sat there brooding, be¬ 
came a living certainty to Dagmar. She loved Pal, 
she had kissed Pal. He did not love her, he had 
laughed at her secretly. For no definite or concrete 
reason Dagmar accepted the agony of this conclu¬ 
sion with an utterly tragic emotion which lay over 
her unconscious conviction of its untruth with deep 
confusing strength. Solely because her aunt had 
pricked an uneasy bubble of poison, lodged in her 
system by the effect on her temperament of three 
days of neglect, she became suffused with bitterness 
and watched the slowly lengthening strands of water 
rebounding with the rhythmicality of jugglers’ balls 
from the roof, more solid now that the rain was 


52 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


lessening. She had forgotten all her new philosophy, 
forgotten that she had renounced the image of her¬ 
self as the pure unkissed maiden. She was lost ut¬ 
terly in her old idea of herself: a self who had acted 
in an unspeakably cheap way. She wept to think 
that though she had given Pal what she mentally 
phrased as her all, he in return had given nothing. 
He had never uttered one tense satisfying phrase 
such as she had dreamed of; he had been callous, 
horrible. “ God, you sweet thing,” Prince Vladimer 
had said on more than one occasion, “I adore the 
ground you walk on, I worship the air you breathe.” 
Pal had never even uttered one tame, I love you. 
That he had never thought of her seriously was 
evident. Why, he had never even mentioned mar¬ 
riage ! 

Dagmar, the modem flapper, Dagmar the hard- 
boiled egg, was forgotten as Dagmar tearfully slipped 
over to her writing-desk and began a letter: 

“Dear Pal: 

“I feel so bewildered, like a small child that cannot 
find the path among a lot of horrid trees and bushes. 
You, being the last person in the world that any 
other girl placed in my situation would dream of 
confiding in, I have perfectly determined to tell you 
all about it. 


THE EXPERIMENT 


53 


“I have hit the sawdust trail and seen the light. 
What a stupid person I have been, until suddenly 
my eyes became opened !” 

This much had gone smoothly enough, and had 
soothed Dagmar somewhat. Perhaps she wouldn’t 
send the letter, but it would do her good to write 
it, anyway, she thought. 

“Some time ago I decided that I had better be 
kissed. It discouraged me terribly to think that I was 
unfashionably still sweet sixteen, and so forth. . . . 
So I tried and tried and tried to let somebody, but 
I somehow couldn’t. ” Here Dagmar wrote very 
fast, with flushed cheeks, as she always seemed to get 
along better in the realm of pure fiction. “It was 
the most irritating thing in the world to my experi¬ 
mental nature. I am so horribly squeamish about 
those things. I led innocent youths on to believe 
that I was madly in love with' them only to snub 
them abominably when they tried to touch me. I 
snubbed them against my better judgment. 

“As you know, you solved the experiment for me. 
Why I picked on you is an awful mystery to me. It 
is all so awfully cheap. I am not like that. It 
humiliates me terribly when I think it all over now. 
I realize that I have been awfully common, and I 


54 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


cannot imagine what in the world you must think 
of me. ” 

“D.” was her intriguing signature to this letter, 
which she sat fingering pensively for some time, 
making up her mind to send it. It seemed to her a 
very amusing and somewhat daring epistle. If he 
did not telephone to her that night, she would know 
then that he did not like her, and would send the 
letter. 

The next afternoon, as she had heard no word from 
him, she walked slowly down Summit Avenue, past 
three mail-boxes and finally, with a frightening cour¬ 
age that seemed to weigh down on her until she felt 
as if she might bend in two, she dropped it into the 
mail-box. 

It was unanswered. In a day or two she heard 
that he had gone back to his home in Chicago. For 
two weeks she was heart-broken, but gradually her 
imagination was again fired by exaggerated stories 
of girls slightly older, and for the two years before 
she came out she was the victim of the catfish sophis¬ 
tication of her generation, drinking cocktails, com¬ 
placently being kissed, and (aping Margaret who 
followed the older tradition of throwing a tragic veil 
of romance about herself) she would recite the story 
of Paul Hallo well and her vanished fortune. 


THE EXPERIMENT 


55 


Herbie, that summer, was the depressed companion 
of a tutor. Already a year beyond the age when 
most boys were in high school, it was imperative 
that he enter a college preparatory school that 
autumn. He was now, at fifteen, grown taller than 
Dagmar, a big mysterious animal who liked to lie 
long hours on the beach in the sun by himself. 
“What are you thinking about?” some one asked 
him one day. “I'm just supposing and supposing,” 
he answered. And after that he was the unhappy 
victim of boyish jeers: “Been doing much supposing 
lately, Herbie?” 

His unpopularity was a curious anomaly in that 
family with its outstanding social talents. 




CHAPTER FIVE 


DEBUT 

Two years later, when she was nineteen, Dagmar 
finished school and came out. Not much prettier 
than any girl picked at random from a crowd, all 
men called Dagmar a beauty and exuded a silent 

atmosphere of faint contempt when other girls tried 

/ 

to bring up Dagmar’s henna rinses and eyebrow 

pencils against her. For Dagmar was one of those 

girls who not only take joy in attracting men, but 

actually do disturb almost any atmosphere charged 

with the presence of even one male. She was the 

sort of girl of whom her feminine acquaintances say: 

“She’s all right until a man comes around!” With 

the aid of a box of rouge, a lipstick, and, on fitting 

occasions, an eyebrow pencil, she had made out of 

her only moderately pretty countenance, an utterly 

lovely dew-on-the-budding-rose face which went very 

well with her fashionably slight and boyish figure. 

Next to her talent for attracting men, which was 

a plain gift from God, and had only been slightly 

augmented by Dagmar’s efforts, her outstanding 

characteristic was a tremendous incapacity for work 

of any kind; and on account of those nebulous dreams 

56 


DEBUT 


57 


and desires for perfection which in young girls are 
called ideals, a poetic, if intermittent, warfare went 
on in Dagmar’s soul in which the element of indo¬ 
lence almost always won. 

At Dagmar’s coming-out party, Margaret Patlock 
observed with some delight and a dash of jealousy 
what she thought was an expertness of selection in 
her daughter, who seemed to have separated a cer¬ 
tain millionaire newspaper owner named Willard 
Freeman from the rest of the eligible beings disgust¬ 
edly sipping tea there that afternoon. It was late 
enough in the fall to make it necessary for this, 
Margaret’s first function of the season, to be light¬ 
ened with imitation yellow candle-light, which mod¬ 
ulated the old house to a pleasing harmony of soft 
gray tones. 

In a babel of women’s light voices, Dagmar would 
often forget the scene before her and live for a second 
in a splendid scene of her imagination, colored almost 
always by a light novel she had been reading. In 
retrospect, or in the future, she could infuse almost 
any event with tingent pastels and gilded shadows 
until it partook of some of the glamour of the ro¬ 
mance she craved. And once, when one of those 
particularly sentimental and sensational revelations 
of the younger set was having its day of popularity, 
Dagmar said: “It’s just like my life. Now I know 




58 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


that I am not the only girl who has done foolish 
things. Sometimes I’ve been so depressed about 
myself, but since I’ve read this book ...” 

But this afternoon with Will Freeman, unexpect¬ 
edly attentive, Dagmar had no time for one of those 
delightful momentary mystic scene changes. She 
was not greatly interested in Will, but in the back 
of her mind there was the pleasant thought of the 
sensation she would make if Will should like her 
seriously. Handsome and wealthy, he had begun his 
magnificent career of escaping debutantes several 
years before Dagmar was bom. Margaret, watching 
him casually, thought of her own debutante days, 
when she had almost achieved him. She wondered 
just how nearly she had succeeded. It would be in¬ 
teresting to know. He saw through me, she thought 
with a tinge of respect. So few men seemed to be 
able to do that. It had been all for the best, no 
doubt. That mysterious instinct, which persuades 
all of us that events definitely in the past had been 
all for the best, titillated her. She sighed. It would 
have been more gratifying to Margaret to see that 
Dagmar was to be a success socially if that slight 
envious tang had not been there. That gently sad 
overtone which a woman, thirty-seven and still very 
beautiful, hears droning its long monotonous, mourn¬ 
ful note when she looks on a young girl surrounded 


DEBUT 


59 


by the adulation that she has been able to command 
so long. The supple body, the black shining hair, 
rolling up gracefully from the slender neck, the blue, 
youthful eyes: these were all Margaret’s still; they 
stamped her like a trade-mark of youth. But twenty 
more years of it for Dagmar; and Dagmar had it, 
Dagmar had it, that priceless buoyant expectancy in 
her soul, whose semblance could only be induced in 
Margaret by three or four cocktails. 

Suddenly there was a commotion in the hall. The 
voice of the untrained Finn who was assisting the 
cook seemed to boom all over the house. “Veil!” 
she heard, and again, “Veil!” and then Etholla’s 
nervous soprano: “Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’m going 
to fall.” As usual she had miraculously recovered 
from her illness at the first sign of gaiety down¬ 
stairs. “Everybody left me alone,” her thin voice, 
strangely penetrating, came through two rooms to 
Margaret. “Nobody but Olga left to help me down¬ 
stairs. Just like Margaret. As if I wouldn’t make 
a special effort to attend my only niece’s—” and so 
on, her voice was lost in the conversational rumble. 

Etholla in some satisfaction, since no less than 
three boys had deserted Dagmar to fly to her assis¬ 
tance, allowed herself to be magnificently led across 
the room to a couch which was vacated by two ma¬ 
trons and a timid young girl for her. 


6o 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


From this hastily evacuated couch, which had an 
intrinsic overbearing and sneering quality and was 
easily the strongest point in the house, Etholla began 
to talk about her ailments and cures, at the same 
time keeping a curious eye on her niece and the still 
attentive Will Freeman. At fifty, Willard Freeman 
had grayish thinning hair which had once been the 
color of a lion’s mane and just as thick. It now 
clung closely to his head which seemed to be gradu¬ 
ally soaking it in, until finally there would be no more 
of it, and Will Freeman, the debonair, the handsome 
Will Freeman, would be as bald as the day he was 
bom. This catastrophe was still in the distance, 
and Will Freeman was still the traditionally irresis¬ 
tible and uncapturable bachelor of the town. Since 
his winter in India at the age of twelve he had run 
all over the world, coming back always to St. Paul. 
At the suitable age he had gone to Harvard, where 
he had been intimate with an incredible number of 
persons who had since become famous, even legen¬ 
dary national figures. He now lived alone in the big 
house on Summit Avenue that his father had built 
in the days when Crocus Hill was a mass of yellow, 
sweet-smelling crocuses in the springtime, and when 
the fashionable portion of the town was still down on 
the other side of the city. The elder Freeman had 
explained with a haughtiness which Will had inher- 


DEBUT 


61 


ited, that he had moved up for the view over the 
Mississippi fiats. This valley, with its shifting moods 
as inconstant as the sea, was one of the reasons why 
Will Freeman, wander as he might over all the world, 
always returned each year to St. Paul. “Bay of 
Naples, bah!” Will would say, sipping contentedly 
his high-ball from the terrace of his home. He alter¬ 
nated during his periods in the city between the 
wearying life of the most popular bachelor in town, 
and times when he shut himself up and refused all 
invitations. The paradoxical idea prevailed, es¬ 
pecially among the women, that on these occasions 
Will was sulking over a love-affair. 

“I was at Wiesbaden for a clinic,” Aunt Etholla 
was saying, * * and really the German doctors can teach 
us a lot. They put this mask over my face and 
there was a little electric fan at my side that blew 
through the soft cloth of the mask and I could see 
everything, but the doctors couldn’t see my face. 
And, well, they just did everything to me. I had 
this electric globe up inside of me for half an hour, 
and really I would have been terribly embarrassed 
if I hadn’t known that these doctors wouldn’t ever 
recognize me again because you see they couldn’t 
see my face. Well, my dear, the most peculiar thing 
was wrong with me. Did I ever tell you about it ? 
Oh, I must tell you then ”—her body hitched forward 




62 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


several inches and she actually achieved a note of 
enjoyment. . . . 

A stir of new interest was apparent among the 
women. They began to babble. “Yes, these clin¬ 
ics are really terrible things,” another middle-aged 
maiden was saying. “Why, I went into one and right 
in front of three or four doctors there I was without 
a stitch of clothing on. I was frightfully embar¬ 
rassed. ...” 

“And the doctor said to me as I was lying there 
on the table trying to hitch this perfectly inadequate 
sheet around me: ‘Is this Mrs. Pound?’ I said 
‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Have you any children, Mrs. 
Pound?’ and smiled. I said, ‘Yes, I have two chil¬ 
dren,’ and he said, ‘Ah, both boys, I suppose, Mrs. 
Pound. Lift your right knee a little-’ ” 

“Oh, it’s ghastly . . . but they get so used to it, 
those doctors, they really don’t think anything of 
it.” 

“I have had six children and been to the hospital 
for a couple of operations, but I’m still ridiculously 
modest about things like that. ” 

But it was Etholla, who had detailed her experi¬ 
ences at Wiesbaden steadily throughout the dis¬ 
cussion, who said the last word: 

“I’m so modest I can’t bear to even discuss things 
with my doctor! ” 



DEBUT 


63 


In Margaret some scheming instinct of shadowy 
grandeur was thinking that it would be a triumph 
if Dagmar could marry Will Freeman. She visual¬ 
ized for an instant a more glorified afternoon, with 
Dagmar entering, flushed and starry-eyed, from St. 
Margaret’s Church, beside Will Freeman, lately 
invulnerable. A maternal tenderness rose in her 
and she longed for a sentimental chat with Dagmar, 
in which she addressed her daughter as Childie and 
Dagmar called her “Mother.” 

*‘Must you go ? ” . . . “So sweet of you, my dear!” 
and a number of “ Really’s” were for fully five min¬ 
utes Margaret’s conversation as she thought of Dag¬ 
mar and Will. But her musings were suddenly in¬ 
terrupted by the stridently sugared voice of her sister 
Etholla who, in one of those sudden lulls which some¬ 
times occur in a chattering assembly, had boomed a 
remark, meant to be merely cattily conversational, 
all over the company: “I agree with you,” Etholla 
had been saying when the lull occurred. “From the 
way she’s holding on to Will, it seems to me that 
Dagmar likes him very much. ” 

There was an atmosphere in the room of a hun¬ 
dred titters writhing in their silent death agonies 
before the sea of conversation mercifully rose and 
flooded the room again. 

That year Dagmar danced in the Junior League 


6 4 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Show, and the younger married men meeting her 
casually on the street or in semi-public places would 
say to her quizzically: “It won’t be long now until 
we hear of you on the stage ! ’ ’ Dagmar, too, thought 
it would not be long. The boys her own age were 
stricken with a kind of awe whenever they thought 
of her future greatness as a dancer, for Dagmar had 
that quality of inspiring faith in herself so strongly 
that many people who had never seen her dance said 
of her: “That Dagmar Hallowed now, there’s a girl 
who is going to be something some day!” 

This glory finished off Dagmar’s first season and 
hung as a somewhat dazzling glow throughout the 
summer and into her second season. And still she 
was having a good time, feeling faintly bored and 
filled from time to time with longings to be away, to 
be doing something; longings that were easily diluted 
by the prospect of a more magnificent party which 
was always coming off next week. For events in 
the future held a larger magnificence always than 
remembered good times, even the most brilliant of 
them. 

In the fall she thought perhaps she might begin to 
study or go East and try to get into one of the New 
York shows, but she was still too much in love with 
having a good time, and though she had adopted the 
habit of her generation of being bored with every- 


DEBUT 65 

thing, she still went to each new party with enormous 
gusto. 

And so she got through the winter, which was in¬ 
terrupted for the family only by the advent of Her¬ 
bert on three separate occasions; each occasion be¬ 
ing his ejection from three different preparatory 
schools. By spring he had been fired from a St. 
Paul High School and was a depressed attendant of 
the St. Paul Academy, where he could be seen on 
pleasant days walking with his long solemn face 
and parted lips among boys only a little more than 
half as high as he was, like a long, mournful milk¬ 
weed sticking up out of a carefully clipped hedge. 
“How’s the air up there?” his companions would 
jeer, and the apathetic Herbie seemed scarcely to 
mind. Nor did he mind the snickers that seemed 
painfully suppressed in the classroom whenever he 
w^as called upon. For, though he was seventeen, he 
had not yet completed his second academic year, 
and the fourteen and fifteen year olds in the class, 
many of whom were small for their age, glibly an¬ 
swered questions over which Herbie stumbled. 

It is reported of Dagmar Hallo well that at one 
period of her life she stated: “When I’m grown up 
I’m going to be just a plain married woman. ” That 
must have been when she was about eight and going 
through the phase of washing dolls and airing the 


66 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


cat in a miniature go-cart. For by the time she was 
ten this homely ambition had entirely vanished in 
the maze of more thrilling and brilliant futures which 
she felt indubitably awaited her. The social career 
of the well-advertised after-the-war girl, whose cur¬ 
rent absurdities were faithfully committed by Dag- 
mar, promised more excitement and admiration than 
even that of an actress, and so another year went by 
and another Junior League Performance, it appeared, 
was necessary to the health of the city; the money 
was needed for the hospital, hundreds of girls made 
their yearly explanation to sceptical husbands and 
fathers who would insist that a donation of money 
would be cheaper to the giver and more valuable to 
the receiver. 

Dagmar came to the try-out attired in her cos- ■ 
tume of the-year-before velvet breeches, a ruffled 
blouse, and socks. 

“Well, you ready to try out, ” snarled the director, 
a fiery-eyed little Jew, apparently obsessed by the 
notion that George Ade, David Belasco, Edgar 
Selwyn, and Ring Lardner were finding it hard to get 
along in New York without him. The names of 
these celebrities and half a dozen more were con¬ 
stantly on his lips, and his manner to the flower of 
mid-western society was at all times brusque and 
deprecatory. 


DEBUT 67 

“Em quite ready,” said Dagmar with a self- 
assurance probably irritating to the director. 

“What can you do ?” 

“Oh, I dance,” said Dagmar easily and patroniz¬ 
ingly. “Let me see, you’d better play—” she 
named a popular song, which the director, shrugging 
his shoulders as he swung around on the piano stool, 
began to fling lazily into the room. 

Dagmar danced. The director eyed her scepti¬ 
cally. It was evident that he was more interested in 
his own playing than he was in Dagmar, and he was 
not interested in his own playing at all. He tossed 
the melody into the room with the aristocratic care¬ 
lessness of a millionaire newsboy throwing away half- 
smoked cigarettes for his former associates to pick up. 

“What else can you do ?” he asked, when Dagmar 
finished. 

“Well, I—I dance,” said Dagmar with less assur¬ 
ance. 

“Go on, then,” said the director turning wearily 
back to the piano. 

Dagmar, feeling uncomfortable, did her dance over 
again. She fancied that some of her best friends 
were slyly smiling at each other, and on her brow she 
felt a slight perspiration. 

“What else you do?” implacably inquired the 
director. 


68 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“Just dance. ” 

“Yeah, well let me break it to you that you’re 
no dancer, Miss Hallowell. You’re good-looking, 
though, and if you have any voice at all you can 
go in the chorus.” 

Dagmar fell back into the ranks. “Isn’t he kill¬ 
ing?” whispered one of the girls in her ear, but 
Margaret who had come to the rehearsal, rushed for¬ 
ward to the support of her child. “I never heard of 
anything so perfectly ridiculous in all my life. 
Every one praises my daughter’s dancing. But after 
this I wouldn’t dream of allowing her to be in the 
performance. ” 

There was a chorus of protest from half a dozen 
young men and one or two girls. “Nonsense, Mar¬ 
garet, I’ll be glad to be in the chorus, ” said Dagmar 
vigorously. She was badly disappointed, but not, 
as those obliging persons, who are always so kindly 
in their relation of such incidents to large audiences, 
said, surprised. ‘ 1 1 was a fool to think I could dance 
like a professional,” she said to herself. 

She did go in the chorus, and the director, who was 
equally disparaging to almost every one else, allowed 
her to come on twice with a male chorus, dancing and 
smiling at the audience, but her dream of a stage 
career was blasted, and for a time she felt lost, drift¬ 
ing, with no harbor in sight, for always the stage 


DEBUT 


69 


career had stood to her as something definite that 
she would some day do. Love, it is true, still lay in 
the future with all its speculatory hopes and dreams, 
but Dagmar did not regard marriage as an end in 
itself. 


CHAPTER SIX 


PAL 

As Dagmar was getting out of the motor, she 
almost tripped Dorothy Wiate who had risen to fol¬ 
low her, by stopping short at the sight of a young 
man, with his overcoat turned up about his collar, 
and his hat pulled low on his forehead, who was com¬ 
ing down the street. 

Palomon Bennett in the flesh was advancing to¬ 
ward Dagmar, a frown of annoyance shadowing his 
black-browed, blue eyes. He did not see her, but he 
was turning into the house where she was going for 
dinner. So she stopped short and almost tripped 
Dorothy Wiate. A soft drizzle came down on her 
hair, and nestled sighingly into the folds of her wrap. 
The scene w~as grayed and softened like a harsh 
charcoal drawing rubbed over with a cloth, and the 
lights from the houses and streets were given reflec¬ 
tions by the wetness, and made to look like strange, 
glittering yellow jewels. 

“You crazy?” demanded Dorothy Wiate, but 
Dagmar, trying to remember what he had looked like, 
made no response. He looked older and more hand¬ 
some than she had remembered. “. . . my marcel’s 
coming out,” grumbled Dorothy. “If this weather 

70 


PAL 


7 i 


is going to last I’m going to get a permanent wave.” 

“Good idea,” murmured Dagmar excitedly. She 
would actually be meeting him in a few moments. 
She wondered if there could be some mistake. She 
hadn’t even heard he was in town. 

She had neither seen nor heard from him since 
that day nearly four years before when she had 
written to him. Her heart sank a little even now 
at the thought of that note, but the curiosity which 
had animated her more than once in those four years 
now began to stir and simmer inside of her as she 
thought that at last she was going to find out what 
he had thought of the “experiment.” 

Leaning over the dressing-table to examine care¬ 
fully the rouge on her upper lip, the joy that was 
filling her focussed suddenly to a smile. 

“Practising,” said Dorothy Wiate disagreeably. 

Dagmar was too absorbed even to notice. “What 
you say?” she murmured absent-mindedly. She 
had suddenly realized that Pal Bennett had taken a 
place in her heart beside the splendid Prince Vladi- 
mer, and that she was as excited at the thought of 
meeting the one as she would have been at meeting 
the other. 

He was standing by the fireplace when she en¬ 
tered the drawing-room. Tall, slim-waisted and— 
with a shock of surprise she remembered—blond! 


72 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


On either side of the middle part a wave of red-gold 
hair rolled smoothly back. But his brows, his lashes, 
his skin were dark. “That’s why,” thought Dagmar, 
“I didn’t remember that his hair was yellow. No, 
his eyes were blue, dark blue.” “The effect,” said 
Dagmar next day to Ann Orr, “is startling.” 

Their eyes met with the same searching, curious 
look. Dagmar felt his gaze sweep her cheek, her 
hair, her neck, with a swift secrecy as if he, too, were 
confirming a remembered impression. Their hands 
touched as he said cordially: “This is great, to see 
you again.” 

He was a little taller, a little firmer, a little older, 
she saw in that first moment; an image that faded 
in swift receding flashes into the Pal she remembered 
until almost immediately he seemed the same boy 
she had known so well four years ago. ‘ ‘ He must 
be,” she thought, “nearly twenty-three years old.” 

“I’m just up here on a flying trip,” he was ex¬ 
plaining. “They thought grandmother was going 
to die, but it was a false alarm apparently. She 
seems as hale and hearty as ever to me. Listen, 
Dagmar, I wish I could get a chance to talk to you 
before I go back. I’m supposed to be devoting my¬ 
self to that large fat hussy over there in the shawl or 
whatever she’s got on.” 

“As rude as ever, I see,” said Dagmar. 


PAL 


73 

He frowned. “I'm not rude. I’m never rude. 
I have to go back to Chicago to-night and-” 

But the party took this moment to surge and toss 
them apart like pieces of driftwood in a storm. Joe 
Brown was pulling her arm and muttering, “Little 
something to tell you, Dagmar, listen here-” 

“What time?” called Dagmar over her shoulder, 
vaguely aware that she was being led into the din¬ 
ing-room. 

“Ten o’clock,” said Pal over the heads of a dozen 
people, and then a long dreary dinner separated them. 

She sat beside Joe Brown, who liked to be thought 
a knowing fellow, one who knew what was what and 
who was who. In consequence his gossip was often 
stigmatized as bad taste, and he was eternally being 
snubbed. At one time, having been what he called 
a radical, he had come to St. Paul to work for Will 
Freeman’s paper, and was now undergoing a period 
in which he posed as an intellectual aristocrat and 
strove to enter the moneyed aristocracy of the city 
with all the assiduity of one who has complete faith 
in its genuineness. 

On Dagmar’s other side was Will Freeman, who 
was constantly put beside Dagmar these days by 
dozens of hostesses who were breathlessly hopeful of 
his being caught at last. 

“What have you been reading, Will?” asked Dag- 




74 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


mar, because she thought it would be nice to be in¬ 
tellectual a little while for Will’s benefit. 

“ I’ve just finished the third volume of ‘ Marcel 
Proust/ ” said Will, amusedly answering Dagmar 
with the sincerity he always gave her, as one says 
things to a child, accurately, in the belief that it 
will understand part. 

“Oh, Prew,” said Dagmar, who, as Will very well 
knew, had never heard of him before. “I think he’s 
an egg, don’t you ?” 

“ Rather,” said Will, smiling. Joe Brown, how¬ 
ever, had caught the last part of the conversation. 
He beamed. 

“Egg? Oh, yes, egg. I think that’s an awfully 
good expression. I always use it.” 

Dagmar looked across the table and down and 
caught Pal’s eye. They smiled secretly, and Dag¬ 
mar thought with a sinking heart of the concert to¬ 
ward which they were all bent, and the ten-o’clock 
train which would prevent her from seeing Pal alone 
at all. 

“Ernie Bishop seems always to be hanging around 
that Palmer girl,” whispered Joe Brown. This was 
one of his countless little innuendoes that he hoped 
made him seem on intimate terms with the people he 
strove to emulate. 

“She’s announcing her engagement to him next 


PAL 


75 

week, I believe,” snapped Dagmar, who was apt to 
let Mr. Brown’s harmless remarks annoy her. 

“On a hundred a week ?” asked Brown, raising his 
brows. “That’s what he’s getting, I believe.” 
Dagmar made no comment, and he continued, rais¬ 
ing a waggish brow: “But I forgot her grand¬ 
mother. Is it true that old Mrs. Gompers gives 
each of her grandchildren that marries a hundred 
and fifty a month ?” 

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Dagmar and turned 
to speak to Will Freeman, but the question raised a 
faint unpleasant undercurrent to her thoughts. 
Girls nowadays almost had to have money if they 
wanted to marry, she was thinking, unaware that 
“nowadays” in that connection was a state of affairs 
that had existed perennially. It was true that 
Marie Holmes’s people had given her two hundred a 
month to add to Roy’s three hundred, and that Mar¬ 
ian Faylor got the same sum from her parents that 
her husband earned, and that they increased the 
money whenever Kenneth got a raise at the office. 
Dagmar was not of the caliber which frets either 
openly or secretly because she is deserted for wealth. 
She had too much charm to ever be deserted com¬ 
pletely, and none of the young men who had been 
attracted to her and gradually drifted away to girls 
with more money had ever attracted her enough to 


76 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


cause her more than a faint ripple of annoyance. 
And yet, and yet, Ernie Bishop had been desper¬ 
ately unhappy over her not four months before, and 
had begged her to marry him on his twenty-five 
dollars a week. She had refused solely because she 
felt no desire to marry him, for she was determined 
to marry for love, though the romance of poverty 
did not appeal to her. 

Ernie Bishop and three or four other boys who 
had vowed desperate things for her were now either 
married or on the point of being so to girls who had 
enough money to make at least half of the household. 
Supposing, just supposing, that she, Dagmar, should 
fall in love with a poor man? She considered Palo- 
mon Bennett across the table, his blond beauty 
seemed to suggest a ripeness, a plenitude that was 
incompatible with poverty. But supposing he were 
poor . . . her heart sank down within her, even as 
she began to think hastily of a solution of the matter, 
a habit as characteristic of Dagmar as it is of the age 
in which she lives. For to her it was unthinkable 
that in her young bravery she should not find an 
ultimate solution to any difficulty that might pre¬ 
sent itself. Though surely she was thinking she 
would not fall in love with a man who was poor—‘ ‘ If 
she did ... if she did,” the little teasing undercur¬ 
rent of disquiet whispered, if she did, then she 


PAL 


77 


would find some way out of it. She would even work 
herself, if necessary. There was some way that she 
could marry him and they could get rich. Was this 
handsome young man really poor ? 


CHAPTER SEVEN 
SYMPHONY 


By eight o’clock the St. Paul Auditorium was 
almost as full as it would be. The musicians were not 
yet on the platform, yet the chairs, symmetrically 
arranged, the bared stage, and above all the air of 
expectancy in the audience, were immediate pre¬ 
cursors of their arrival. At the front of the house 
the first five or six rows were unoccupied, and scat¬ 
tered throughout were a few groups of seats which 
would be filled later by the fashionable portion of the 
St. Paul audience. At the back of the house no 
boxes were as yet filled, but in a box at the right of 
the stage sat two middle-aged Jews discussing a 
crisis in their family while they waited for the con¬ 
cert to begin. 

In the balcony and gallery sat a more austere audi¬ 
ence, which, like the down-stairs had its sprinkling 
of those arid individuals who go in conscientiously 
for higher things, that mild dissipation of the rich 
which becomes a dwarfing vice in the poor. 

The people in the gallery, for the most part, sat 

staring stupidly at the roof: a variety of pastel 

78 


SYMPHONY 


79 


colors in mosaic. The electric light at the top cast 
a faintly unpleasant glitter into their eyes, and they 
shivered with cold, and drew their cloaks closer 
about their shoulders. The air smelled slightly 
damp, but not so much so as it did down-stairs, and 
a few of them, gazing down on the valley full of heads 
embosomed between the stage and the point where 
they sat, felt faintly dizzy. 

In the outer foyer people were still assembling 
in line to get tickets. Girls in evening wraps with 
elaborately marcelled hair would stand for a moment 
waiting for a party, for an escort. The colors of 
their wraps made pleasant splotches here and there in 
the wet, hurrying scene of the outer lobby. Groups 
of women, dully clad or else in garments determinedly 
and disagreeably gay, stood together. And here 
and there were women who forgot themselves at 
least once during the course of every evening of 
gaiety and dropped into the dictatorial tones, or the 
patronizing manner of the schoolroom. 

And babble, babble, babble, went the voices. . . . 
“Oh, Mrs. Peters! I heard you had come back to 
town. . . . Yes, yes, she’s sixteen ... He excels 
in tone and interpretation too. ... I never heard 
of such a thing. . . . Well, well, life has its compen¬ 
sations; I always say that everything is evened up 
for everybody. . . . My dear, do come and see me. 


8o 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


. . . Yes, another girl, this makes five. She’s so 
disappointed, poor thing ” . . . babble, babble, bab¬ 
ble. 

Outside people in raincoats, who had come on foot, 
were hurrying to get in out of the drizzle. Motor¬ 
cars, along the line to the Wilder Charities and 
around the comer to Rice Park, were waiting for a 
parking place, while others, stopping in front of the 
Y. W. C. A. across the street, were letting out the more 
hardy souls who did not mind running across the 
street in the wet. Bigger and grander cars stopped 
constantly in front of the huge building and let out 
gentlemen in dinner array accompanied by immacu¬ 
late ladies with wraps reminiscent of Oriental courts. 

Among these latter persons Margaret Patlock 
entered the by-this-time musty-smelling outer lobby, 
whose floor was traced with the blurred design of 
a hundred muddy feet. With that self-conscious 
haughtiness possessed by nearly all beautiful women 
when they find themselves in the midst of a crowd 
of nondescript people, she paused for the fraction of 
a moment to wait for a gray-haired man with a grave, 
finely chiselled face, who was a member of her party 
and with whom she was reputed to be having what 
was called among her acquaintances “an affair.” 

The beautiful line of her neck, emphasized by a 
soft pyramid of black hair piled high at the back of 


SYMPHONY 


81 


her head, seemed to grow out of her black cape like 
the stalk of a delicate flower. Her coiffure softly 
outlined her fragile face, in contrast to the head¬ 
dress of many less studiously attractive women, some 
of whom looked as if their hair had been carved out 
of wood in imitation of a human head. Across the 
big lobby she looked like a beautiful and radiant girl 
of twenty, but the people beside her could see that 
she was heavily rouged, and her eyes, big and blue, 
glittered under a weight of too much mascara. Her 
skin was too thick in texture, now with its layer of 
make-up, for she had passed the age when the rouge 
melts into the flesh and seems to mingle with the 
warm young blood. For the faithless cosmetics 
which for a young and pretty girl can crystallize that 
buoyant excited radiancy, which is the only magnet 
a poor girl bent on marrying a fortune has ever had, 
abandon their art for the ugly woman, the sick 
woman, the no-longer-young woman, and leer ironi¬ 
cally from her countenance, emphasizing the very 
deficiencies she is trying to conceal. 

For Margaret they still had some potency. They 
could, for instance, make her look young again under 
a large hat. They could, too, make a few people 
think, “How beautiful she would be if she didn’t 
paint so much”; for Margaret had passed the point 
where she could hope to enhance her natural charms. 


82 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Her cosmetics were now used principally as a deco¬ 
rative scheme and made no attempt to conform to the 
rules laid out by nature. 

In the lobby she looked around to see if Dagmar’s 
party had arrived. She wondered vaguely about 
Willard Freeman. If only he would ... if Dag- 
mar only could achieve the impossible and get Wil¬ 
lard to marry her. It seemed like tempting Provi¬ 
dence even to hope for it. It was too good. A 
shame, too. She sighed. There were so few wealthy 
men left unmarried. What a pity ! 

A young man with whom she was hoping to have 
an affair came gaily across the lobby. She crossed 
swiftly to him, striving to penetrate the pallid, 
blond, and impersonal mask with which he defended 
himself with a deeply personal glance. He looked at 
her smiling impassively, understanding that this 
was only part of Margaret’s fun, a phase of the 
pastime popular among the younger married set 
with whom Margaret was perennially in favor. Her 
face was emotional with unfeigned feeling, for Marga¬ 
ret could only find satisfaction for the craving which 
gnawed her in extracting a more personal homage 
from the men she knew than most women got. She 
longed to have a romantic affair with all the ardor of 
a sixteen-year-old girl, and was striving always to 
find some partner for it among the prosaic men of 


SYMPHONY 


83 


her acquaintance. Many of these men were willing 
to enter into a subterranean business of casual em¬ 
braces, in most cases hardly even disloyal to their 
wives, but none of them had the taste for a great 
love-affair, the desire to find eternal things with 
Margaret, which her soul craved. 

“Oh, Cyril,” she breathed at him, but he merely 
looked down at her curiously and felt dimly glad 
that his wife hadn’t come to the concert with 
him. And yet he was not averse from her ad¬ 
vances. He was, in fact, slightly flattered and a 
little stirred by her, but he felt that it might be 
uncomfortable to become too deeply involved. He 
was a detached, emotionless fellow whom his friends 
called Cereal. 

The protagonist of her current affair had by this 
time joined them, and three other members of the 
party quickly formed in a little group in the inner 
lobby, talking to aquaintances, nodding, waving 
across the long room. Dagmar’s party had not 
come when they entered a box at the back of the 
house, which they did as the first creaking strains 
of the stringed instruments began. The melodious 
approach in the major to the gracious and delicate 
first theme in G minor hushed most of the audience. 
But the members of Margaret’s party continued 
murmurous arguments and anecdotes begun before 


84 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


they entered, though with a gradual slackening-down 
of interest. 

But at the first notes of the G-minor theme Mar¬ 
garet closed her conversation abruptly, and, leaning 
slightly away from the man to whom she had been 
talking, closed her eyes, tautened her features, and 
assumed the expression of a person undergoing bliss 
of an extreme nature. As bar after bar ascended, 
Margaret seemed lost in the magic of the melody, 
and her breast heaved; she put her hand on her heart, 
and raised her chest as if to drink more and more from 
the melodic fount. The people with her were pre¬ 
sumably unimpressed with her histrionic efforts, or 
else were genuinely absorbed in the music, but she 
was the only one so completely rapt that she did 
not turn her head at a bustle at the door, to see Dag- 
mar and the young Palomon Bennett signalling 
frantically to their party which were seated down in 
the tenth row. In some way they had arrived too 
late for the first number and would have to wait 
until the intermission before joining their party. 
Many persons in the audience recognizing Dagmar, 
were pleasantly excited for a moment to think she 
would have to stand wearily inside the door for a 
matter of probably half an hour. 

Those underground methods of communication, 
familiar to persons who, having the status of adults, 


SYMPHONY 


*5 


are still adolescent, had been employed by Dagmar 
and the young man to make known to each other the 
following facts: they liked each other remarkably 
well; they hated concerts; if you could manage to 
delay entering the theatre until after the first num¬ 
ber was begun you weren’t allowed to go in until it 
was over. 

On reaching the auditorium, Dagmar slipped into 
the woman’s dressing-room, where she waited until 
the first number had begun. Palomon mumbling 
something about cigarettes, managed likewise to 
slip away from the crowd. Both then hurried pant¬ 
ing up to the door, and were told by chilling atten¬ 
dants that they couldn’t go to their seats until the 
number was over. “You can wait inside the door, 
though,” muttered the attendants, while Dagmar 
signalled frantically to the rest of the party, most of 
whom, being regular attendants at symphony con¬ 
certs, were glad of almost any distraction to while 
away the moments until the music should be over, 
began a series of head bendings and sh-shes back 
and forth. 

“Come on,” said the boy, and they fled out the 
door and into the long, gloomy, deserted hallway, 
which stretched through the building for a block 
like the sombre and monotonous entrance to the 
cells in a prison. 


86 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“I escaped that, anyway,” he said, “I have to 
beat it at the intermission, and I wouldn’t have had 
a chance for a word with you if I hadn’t thought of 
this. Lucky, Cousin Henrietta didn’t have a 
box. . . 

'‘Yeah, my mother’s in somebody’s box and she 
nearly saw me. She would have grabbed me, only 
she was too busy. A concert’s awful on the poor 
thing’s muscles. She’s a nice woman, and a good 
mother, but she will pose at concerts. I do it some¬ 
times too. It keeps me from being bored thinking 
up different soulful expressions. Margaret does it 
all the time. She always has to have an extra 
facial massage after a concert.” 

“It’s her age,” commented the sage Palomon. 

‘ ‘ In her generation you had to be keen about higher 
things to get by”—he struck a match and said 
abruptly: “Gee, it seems nice to see you again. 
What have you been doing all these years ?” 

“Playing around,” she replied, lighting a ciga¬ 
rette from his match, ‘'nothing more. What have 
you done ?” 

“Business,” said Pal seriously. He began gravely 
to talk about himself, his work, with all the mo¬ 
mentous significance that he seemed to think the 
subject merited. Dagmar, studying his handsome 
young face with its intent, purposeful expression, 



SYMPHONY 


87 


employed the social talent at which she was adept 
of replying sensibly to everything he said without 
knowing or understanding, except vaguely, what he 
was talking about. 

But time was passing and she reflected that it w*as 
necessary for her to know what he had thought of 
her letter to him before he left. So at the first break 
in his monologue about himself, she asked him. 

His face was shaded with a vexed amusement. 
“That hit me hard, Dagmar,” he said, laughing. 
“Of course I was just a kid, but I was pretty far 
gone for all that. And then to be told I was merely 
the subject of a cold-blooded experiment!” He 
looked at her with an amused self-possession that 
was, for some hidden reason, disappointing to Dag¬ 
mar. “That was the trickiest thing a girl ever did 
to me. I’ll always remember you for it.” 

“You really did like me then ?” said Dagmar. 

“Yes,” he fumbled for his cigarette case, “and 
I must say that you shattered my ideals fright¬ 
fully.” 

“But you shattered mine, too,” protested Dag¬ 
mar. “If you’d only told me that you liked me—” 
she accepted another cigarette and hesitated as she 
turned it in her fingers, “but-” 

“Told you,” exclaimed Pal. “That’s a good one. 
If I remember the circumstances at all, I used to 




88 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


hang around until your mother had to call the police 
to get me home.” He sighed, uttered the hack¬ 
neyed, “those were the days,” and added that lately 
he had been so absorbed in his business that he had 
forgotten that a girl existed. 

“Why do you work so hard?” said Dagmar. 
“Heavens!” 

“To earn a living, my impractical and fragile 
young flower, ’ ’ said Pal. ‘ ‘ Did you ever hear of that 
reason ?” 

“Haven’t you any money?” asked Dagmar. 
“I’m supposed to marry money.” 

“You’re crazy if you do,” said the young man. 
“Honestly, I think that stuff’s out of date. A 
clever kid like you ? Hell, you could do anything.” 

“How could I ? On the stage or something? ” 

“No. You know, go into business. Be a real- 
estate broker, or, well, anything. Go into some firm 
and work your way up just like a man. I’m strong 
for this woman stuff, do you know it ? Look at half 
the women that are married and have plenty of 
money who are going in for something, interior deco¬ 
rating, or, well, loads of things. Look at me. I have 
no money, but I’m going to be rich some day. You 
see if I don’t. No wealthy girl for me. I’m going 
to marry whoever I dam please, and if I were you, 
I’d do the same.” 


SYMPHONY 


8 9 


There’s something in that, ’’ said Dagmar. ‘‘Only 
it’s just as easy to fall in love with a man with money, 
as it is to fall in love with a poor ’ ’ 

He was very young, and for some reason stirred 
by the argument. He seized Dagmar by the shoul¬ 
ders, realizing as the soft velvet of her wrap melted 
to his palms that the contact was necessary to his 
comfort, and had been for some moments. “You’re 
talking rot. You won’t find your rich young lover. 
Poor, romantic girls never do. You watch other 
people. You can’t have everything, and there’s 
some fate or law of compensation or something that 
will keep all the nice boys away from you and shove 
dubs at you. Fat old dubs rolling in gold. Thin 
miserly old men. Millions of them, and all rich. 
But not one man of the kind that you could love.” 

Dagmar, who had turned her head and was holding 
herself rigidly, smiled out of the comer of her right 
eye at him. “One hundred per cent American,” 
she laughed. “And out of date.” 

The eraser rampant is the heraldic insignia of the 
younger generation. “Out of date,” the ultimate 
horror, the last dread, was being contemptuously 
tossed back and forth between them, as they exhib¬ 
ited their infant philosophies to one another. Like 
most young people, they fancied that ideas, centuries 
old, were discovered by the glib editorial writers 



90 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


from whom they derived their ideals. Theories, dis¬ 
cussed in monasteries, a thousand years ago, for 
which many men had lived and a few had died, were 
accepted or tossed aside by Dagmar, judged solely 
on a basis of whether she thought they were new 
this year or last. 

“Why do you stretch your neck out that way,” he 
asked with the intensity of interest usually displayed 
by a young man who is almost holding an exceed¬ 
ingly pretty girl in his arms. “Do you think it’s 
alluring ?” 

“Certainly,” said Dagmar. “I know it’s allur¬ 
ing. It’s part of my technic.” She relaxed slightly 
and gave a long sigh, enjoying her conception of her 
tremendous potentialities. She had an absurd belief 
in her ability to trick men into liking her, loving 
her, and was unaware of any forces involved beyond 
her own cleverness. 

The muscles of his face were drawn together, and 
his eyes appeared to have enlarged several sizes. He 
was totally unable to make his next remark seem 
offhand. “Guess I’ll kiss you.” 

‘ ‘ Oh, no, ’ ’ said Dagmar. ‘ ‘ Listen ! The number’s 
over. We must go back.” 

They stood very close, looking at each other, want¬ 
ing to kiss, yet held back by a delicate and romantic 
exaltation that they were afraid of breaking. And 


SYMPHONY 


9i 


then about a dozen people turned the comer and it 
was time for Palomon Bennett to make the best 
excuses he could to his cousin Henrietta and catch 
the train for Chicago. 


CHAPTER EIGHT 


THE WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 

Dagmar, being a graduate of that famous girls’ 
school which boasts that it teaches riding and clear 
thinking was not too well prepared to embark 
on the dimly outlined but splendid career which 
Palomon Bennett had so enthusiastically proposed. 
Nevertheless the suggestion harmonized perfectly 
with her latent, but ever-willing-to-rise, conviction 
that some day she would find herself in the act of 
achieving something memorable and remarkable. 
She longed to have the curtain rise on it. 

In one of her most recent day-dreams she had been 
a newspaper reporter mystically appearing with up¬ 
raised hand in a smart costume, at a critical moment, 
to discover just who the murdered man was. She 
saw herself surrounded by a group of envious girls 
who had read her writings and who were all exclaim¬ 
ing: “How do you do it ? It must be perfectly fas¬ 
cinating!” This was the most practical of all her 
dreams because of her acquaintance with Will Free¬ 
man, who owned the controlling stock in one of the 
St. Paul newspapers. 

The next morning she arose at the astounding 

92 


WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 


93 


hour of nine, and, after breakfasting with the flattered 
John Patlock, called up Will Freeman and demanded 
that he let her work on his newspaper, The St. Paul 
Daily Bee. 

‘'Good heavens, child, what for?” 

“I want it. I want to work.” The short sen¬ 
tence suited Dagmar’s mood, which was that of the 
saddened, disillusioned young woman who wants 
nothing now from life but a chance to serve. 

“Well—” he hesitated, “I don’t interfere down 
in the office very much. However, if you’ll lunch 
with me, we’ll talk it over. ” 

She pursued her way triumphantly up to her room. 
At last she was actually going to do something. She 
sank into a chair and yawned as she looked out of 
the window into the sun-filled morning valley. 

“Good-by, Dagmar,” called John cheerfully. 
“Good luck to the fair young working girl.” He 
could be depended on to approve of any scheme that 
would lead Dagmar into the fields of honest industry 
where his mother had becomingly dwelt. She had, 
in fact, supported John in his early years by taking 
in sewing, and had never lived to see him rise to the 
altitude of marriage with Margaret Montgomery 
Hallo well. 

“Good-by,” answered Dagmar, thinking warmly 
of him in a vision that instantly passed. 


94 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Continually nagged, continually offending Mar¬ 
garet, going about his work, getting older, working 
faithfully for a houseful of women related to him 
only vaguely, pathetically interested in his radio; 
Dagmar thought all this in a rush of impression, 
finishing with the thought: “But most of all he’s 
good. ” 

When she said that John Pat lock was good, Dag¬ 
mar meant that she discerned in him a quality of 
stability that was not among the elegant enhance¬ 
ments which Margaret possessed. No, they were 
all descendants of Charles Montgomery, the charm¬ 
ing old gentleman who had been at pains to shed the 
plebeian virtues as well as the plebeian graces. They 
were not the up-and-coming type. Were they the 
down-and-going type ? inquired an irrelevant imp in 
her brain. “Oh, shut up,” she said to it crossly, “I 
was thinking of Pal Bennett.” Yes, he was the up-and- 
coming type. She settled down more deeply in her 
chair, sinking into the luxury of her thoughts of him. 

Margaret, coming discontentedly up the stairs, 
decided to pay a little call upon her daughter. She 
threw herself on the chaise longue, lighted a ciga¬ 
rette, asked Dagmar if she had enjoyed herself the 
night before, at the same time obsessed by a sense 
of slight depression. Will Freeman, the desirable 
escaping male, being caught by this child Dagmar, 


WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 95 

seemed a little pathetic to her, even while she re¬ 
joiced in it. Yes, they were all getting old. It was 
like the aged leader of the wolf pack leaping on his 
prey and failing to land for the first time. The 
story of Akela in the “Jungle Book” had always 
appealed to her. 

“And Will?” inquired Margaret at last, when an 
opportunity came. 

“Will is a priceless plug,” said Dagmar. “I saw 
as little as possible of him.” 

Margaret was exasperated. For a minute she 
considered pretending that she was unable to com¬ 
prehend Dagmar’s slang. “I’m sure I don’t know 
what you want,” she said in her soft, sighing way. 
Stretched out, the slim lines of her still youthful 
figure were amazingly graceful and beautiful. She 
began to beg Dagmar to tell a social lie for her, which 
she felt was necessary on account of an attractive 
engagement looming up in the place already occupied 
by a less pleasing one. “You could say that I for¬ 
got, and that you were with me when I accepted,” 
she begged, “and maybe Miriam will believe you, 
because she’s going to be perfectly furious.” 

Dagmar refused and said that she was to lunch 
with Will Freeman, which was accepted as satis¬ 
factory by Margaret. Soon afterward they went off 
amiably to town in the same motor, talking the in- 


g6 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


cessant endless gossip, which even in their separate 
circles made them companions, stimulating their self¬ 
admiration by severe comments on other women. 

But at luncheon Will failed to promise Dagmar a 
job. “Please let’s just go over and look through 
the building, anyway,” begged Dagmar. “I’m 
awfully interested in newspapers.” 

Will, under the influence of three cocktails, was be¬ 
ing amused by Dagmar. They climbed into his car 
and astonished the office of the St. Paul Daily Bee 
very much by appearing as a sort of amateur touring 
party, gathering the business manager and the man¬ 
aging editor in their wake as they trailed through. 
Will seldom appeared at the office, and when he did 
his entrance was always very unobtrusive, but Dag¬ 
mar ’s high spirits kept the party very successfully 
from being a quiet one. 

The linotype machines, like models of prehistoric 
animals, were the most thrilling feature of the plant 
to Will, but Dagmar was unimpressed and slightly 
revolted by them. The men beside them were cov¬ 
ered with a black grease and wore unbecoming black 
caps and aprons. 

“It’s dusty—” complained Dagmar. “Why not 
have a few of these, now, quite unattractive persons 
clad in green and yellow, hyacinth and amber? Even 
beige wouldn’t be bad against these black machines 


WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 97 


if you had a pale-blue-tile background. . . You know, 
have the floor a mosaic of pastel tiles. And then I 
suggest a row of shower-baths in some not too promi¬ 
nent place, so that the men can take a bath every 
fifteen minutes or oftener. ” 

Will fell backward on his cane, laughing, the 
gaiety with which he was charged on this day pricked 
by Dagmar’s nonsense. But the business manager, 
a straight, solemn man who looked as if he was bal¬ 
ancing an inverted bowl on his head—that round, 
hard thing surely couldn’t be a human skull—looked 
faintly uneasy, and led the way out and into the 
local room. 

“This is what I want to be,” said Dagmar, turning 
to the managing editor, who had been smiling po¬ 
litely at Dagmar’s humorous effort. He now drew 
down his face and looked serious as Dagmar con¬ 
tinued : “Couldn’t you give me a job ?” 

“If you weren’t so darned highbrow, now,” he 
said. 

4 ‘ Good God, ’’ said Will. * ‘ If that’s all that stands 
in the way, give her a job at once.’’ 

“Give me two jobs!” echoed Dagmar. 

“Give her twenty jobs, ” said Will. “Here, Dag¬ 
mar, sit down at the typewriter and write an inter¬ 
view with the great Mr. Geoffrey Dennis, managing 
editor of-” 



98 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“But I’m serious,” said Dagmar. 

It was not hard, once the managing editor un¬ 
derstood that Will Freeman wanted her to have 
the job. She was given a place in the society room, 
and on the following morning she appeared, an hour 
later than the editor had suggested, to begin her 
duties. 

A fat young man, licking an all-day sucker, came 
into the office where Dagmar sat looking somewhat 
uneasily at Miss Mary Moriarity, the society editor. 
“Haven’t had breakfast yet, ” he grinned at Dagmar. 
“This is my breakfast.” Dagmar shuddered in her 
fur coat, and turned her back. “My dear, who is 
that thoroughly objectionable person?” she asked 
Miss Moriarity, turning from her habitual slang, and 
careless mid-western accent into an unconscious 
imitation of Margaret, imitating an eastern Amer¬ 
ican with social ambitions, imitating a European 
one. Miss Moriarity reddened and sat up very 
straight. “Sh—h—, ” she whispered. “That’s the 
city editor. ” 

Dagmar was disappointed, for she had thought 
that the city editor would be a super-Pal Bennett, 
who would bully her, but secretly love her madly. 
This man would not do at all for that romance. A 
creature who gnawed all-day suckers and needed 
attention from the barber. Fortunately there were 


WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 99 


one or two young men about the office who looked, 
from a distance at least, presentable. 

Dagmar did not suspect that she was to be more 
of a hindrance than a help to the society department. 
In fact, she thought that she would give it an invalu¬ 
able air. She thought that her knowledge of society 
would be a distinct aid to Miss Moriarity, but that 
efficient young woman knew the social standing of 
every one in St. Paul much better than Dagmar did, 
though, personally, she knew very few of the people 
she wrote about. 

John Pat lock was hilarious over Dagmar’s job. 
“That’s pretty smart,” he said again and again. 
“Imagine the pluck of the child wanting to go out 
and earn her own living! She doesn’t inherit any 
of the Montgomery laziness.” 

Margaret was hysterical over it and objected in 
the best family tradition, and Aunt Etholla was bit¬ 
terly sarcastic about it and said that any one could 
see with half an eye what her plans were, but she 
would never get Will Freeman, never in the world. 
Margaret suspected Dagmar of the same object, 
though Dagmar had four times the chance of meet¬ 
ing him socially that she had of meeting him in the 
newspaper-office, which he seldom came near. She 
therefore did not make her objections too strong, 
\nd, more than any one in the world, had hopes 


' > > 


IOO 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


that Willard Freeman would fall in love with 
Dagmar. She knew Dagmar and she knew Wil¬ 
lard, and Willard had almost been in love with her 
once. Yes, she thought that Dagmar had a chance 
of becoming Mrs. Willard Freeman. 

“Dagmar’s such an industrious person”—she 
would fix her blue eyes on other women at teas, and 
continue dreamily: “I beg her to stay in bed some¬ 
times in the morning, but she won’t. Really, I’m 
worried about her. ‘Darling, just rest this morning, 
and let me telephone the office!’ But, no! not 
Dagmar. Such industry! Such determination !” 

As a matter of fact, Dagmar had almost no in¬ 
dustry, though she did have a greater degree of the 
mysterious quality called determination than any 
one else in the family. She was not a good reporter, 
not even a good society reporter, and her habit of 
early rising, deplored by Margaret, had never been 
noticed by any one in the office. 

As the hour approached eleven every morning 
(eight o’clock was the time the other girls got down) 
Dagmar entered, clad in a working-girl’s costume 
that was stagily tailored to a triumphant trimness 
and that shrieked: ‘ ‘ Look! Look! I am a working- 
girl’s costume!” 

She lounged into the room occupied by the hard- 
worked society editor and her equally hard-worked 


WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 


IOI 


other assistant, and, after lighting a cigarette, put 
her feet up on the desk, not so much for comfort as 
because she thought it gave her a reportorial air, 
very chic because it had hitherto been used chiefly 
by men. She then proceeded with some difficulty, 
due to her position, to open her mail, ninety-five 
per cent of which was personal. 

Miss Mary Moriarity, the society editor, was the 
daughter of a quiet and respectable tailor. She had 
worked her way up from file clerk to stenographer, 
from stenographer to secretary to the managing 
editor, and had then stepped into the society de¬ 
partment, where she ruled with an efficiency seldom 
displayed by her particular profession. She disap¬ 
proved of smoking and was fond of telling her six 
younger sisters, who were distributed in positions of 
varied and ever-increasing importance throughout 
the business and editorial stafT of the paper, that the 
way to rise in the world was to come to work on 
time, tend strictly to business, discourage the atten¬ 
tions of men in the office during business hours, and 
preserve at all times a demeanor marked by the 
highest degree of decorum. 

From the time that Dagmar entered at eleven, 
until one o’clock, when the pressing nature of her 
social activities generally took her away, the young 
men of the Bee's editorial staff found time, in spite 


102 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


of the fact that these were the busiest two hours of 
the day, to come into the society room. At least 
six of them were unmistakably in love with her. 
Two office boys had been fired for typing her very 
ill-written scrawls; for Dagmar, at the time she took 
the position, was ignorant of the useful accomplish¬ 
ment of running a typewriter. Irate social climbers 
calling up the paper to put in the list of guests at 
their latest functions suffered all the tortures of 
bafflement and despair while Dagmar, on the tele¬ 
phone argued with some slender youth the question: 
Shall we motor into the country for tea or just run 
over to the University Club ? 

But it would be impossible to estimate the number 
of people who were upset and annoyed and ruined 
by Dagmar’s determination to earn her own living. 
A friend of the owner is probably a deadly menace 
to any business, and Dagmar, being young, pretty, 
wholly incompetent, as well as possessed of an enor¬ 
mous estimate of her own intrinsic worth, was per¬ 
haps a little bit worse for the St. Paul Daily Bee than 
most friends of owners are. 

By Christmas time, after a series of tactical 
skirmishes around Will Freeman worthy of a mili¬ 
tary genius and a greater cause, the managing editor 
of the paper finally boldly went to Will with the 
information that Dagmar was not suited to the work, 


WORKING-GIRL CHARACTERIZATION 103 


in his estimation. “Why not fire her?” asked Will. 
“Fire her!” The editor, on the point of uttering 
a number of incoherent, “I didn’t know whether 
you—that is, being a friend of yours—” suddenly 
closed his mouth and said with the determination 
for which he was noted, “I will!” 

He did. And on the day before Christmas the 
dismal news reached Dagmar, who took the oppor¬ 
tunity to climb the long back-breaking hill home, 
on foot, dragging her feet through the snow and 
thinking sadly of what a failure she was. An innate 
sense of form made her unconsciously glad for the 
sake of contrast that it should have happened on 
Christmas Eve. 


CHAPTER NINE 


CHRISTMAS 

Midnight, and the Christmas service was being 
read at St. Margaret’s. Stately, solemn, with so¬ 
nority and resonance, the Reverend Doctor Meadows 
was reading; and below, the indeterminate audience, 
mostly quivering in fashionable plumage, listened in 
respectable awe to words which held for many of 
them only a vague meaning. 

In the back of the church, a little like a messenger 
from the three wise men, but more like a wandering 
and intoxicated college boy, a voice was heard to 
murmur and then rise until it rang through the 
church, more clearly than ever hotel page enunci¬ 
ated: ‘‘I’m looking for Dagmar Hallo well. Dag- 
mar Hallo well! Dagmar Hallowell!” 

The face of Palomon Bennett, impish, eery, like 
the face of Eros in the midst of his tricks, was caught 
by a gleam of light, and Dagmar with a gasp of ad¬ 
miration and pleasure, utterly incomprehensible to 
John Patlock and Etholla Montgomery, rose and 

walked as proudly out with him as if she had just 

% 

been married. Before the eyes of the neck-twisting 
throng they made their escape. And it was not 

104 


CHRISTMAS 


105 


until then that the pointers out of seats in their stiff 
costumes, unsuitable for running, began an imbecilic 
and short-lived pursuit. 

“Where, ” asked Palomon Bennett in the jargon 
that was his natural method of conversing, “do we 
go from here ? Is there some place that we can go 
and dance ? I’ve never danced with you. ” 

“I know a party I can take you to, ” said Dagmar. 
“Let’s just go in and dance and pretend we don’t 
know anybody and that we think it’s a restau¬ 
rant. ...” 

Pal agreed enthusiastically as any method of out¬ 
raging social custom nearly always met with his 
approval. The party which was being held for the 
younger married set had reached the stage where 
the more serious-minded husbands were forcibly re¬ 
moving the slender fingers of their respective wives 
from around the hard smooth stems of half-filled 
glasses, and Esmeralda Forbes had mounted a chair 
in the middle of the floor where a form of dancing 
was going on, and was proclaiming: “I’m not very 
bright, but every one agrees that I’m most in¬ 
triguing !” 

Dagmar and Palomon swayed back and forth, in a 
superb disdain of the pitiful efforts of the guests at 
the party who were doing quaint, elderly dances, no 
doubt fashionable in their day. An intimacy based 


io6 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


on the very fragility of its actual incidents had 
sprung up between Dagmar and Palomon, which 
made them feel as they evaded one or two men who 
attempted to cut in that they understood all of each 
other’s secret thoughts. 

“This is impossible,” said Pal, glaring with rage 
in his eyes at the bare shoulders of a stout matron of 
thirty who had unexpectedly deposited her bulk 
against him for an instant. “Let’s go some place 
and talk. ” 

They found a corner and subject for conversation 
without any difficulty. The corner was secluded; 
the subject was kissing. The conversation went on 
interminably. Hours passed. The guests went 
home, and they were put out by the hostess at a 
quarter of four on Christmas morning to continue it 
in their walk through the soft white streets. A 
sleepy cab on its way home from a party was im¬ 
prudently hailed by Pal, but here the argument did 
not reach its proper consummation; because Dagmar, 
for reasons as unknown to herself as they were un- 
comprehensible to Pal, decidedly refused to be kissed. 

Dagmar had fallen into her first sleep when she 
was aroused by the sound of hysterical weeping. 
Margaret had just come into the room holding a 
Christmas telegram from Herbie. In spite of the 
mildly erudite gentleman who was being paid to 


CHRISTMAS 


107 

assist Herbie with his studies in his eleventh Eastern 
preparatory school, the young man had once more 
been released. This time on his own initiative. 
Wandering past the symbolic picture of his country 
in the form of a tall gentleman in a Fourth-of-July 
costume, who pointed his finger at Herbie, who was 
now grown to be six foot four and much more gang¬ 
ling than his father had ever been, Herbie had been 
fired with an ambition to join the marines and see 
the world. He had immediately, being nearly 
twenty and in perfect health, been accepted for 
service. And as it was Christmas Day and he was 
leaving for Haiti, he had remembered to telegraph 
his mother the news, together with a suitable greet¬ 
ing in which he had not forgotten either Dagmar or 
his aunt Etholla. 

The morning was spent in frantic pleadings from 
Margaret Patlock to her husband to get her darling 
boy home again, to which John Patlock replied with 
a gloomy silence interrupted by “Suffering Bees¬ 
wax!” and “Great Cat!” The long monotonous 
groans of Etholla echoed through the corridors, and 
Dagmar impatiently arose, ate her breakfast in her 
room, and settled down on the window-seat to think 

over the events of the night before. 

It was all a maze since her unexpected rising in 

the church and going out. It’s queer, she thought, 


io8 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


among other platitudes that she uttered in her self- 
discoveries that he should be so much more impor¬ 
tant to me than any one else I have ever met. Clouds 
of fluffy white vapor seemed to be rising from the 
snow that had fallen the night before down in the 
depths of the valley, making of it a bed as soft and 
downy as a cloud and shutting out the squalor below 
as if their chiffon entablature was supported by 
fairy arches and concealed down there a magic and 
beautiful city. 

She remembered suddenly that Prince Vladimer 
had lived down in the valley and gallantly climbed the 
wall to see her each night. True, there had not been 
a wall, any more than there had been a Prince, “and 
in those days I was ignorant of the fact that Princes 
do not live in Mississippi flats. ” And then she 
thought that Palomon Bennett was not even sym¬ 
bolical of such a Vladimer as her mother would wish 
for her. He hadn’t enough money, and his family, 
said those who were able to detect these delicate 
distinctions in St. Paul society, was a trifle on the 
nouveau-riche side—that branch of it which had 
enough money to be anything at all. “No, he’s 
too much of a dweller in the flats to please my 
mother,” thought Dagmar, “but, then, I have never 
especially tried to please my mother in my life,” 
she added philosophically. 



CHRISTMAS 


109 


That afternoon, wearing that flush which is aroused 
in youth by staying up all night and being afterward 
unable to sleep from excitement, Pal called at Dag- 
mar’s home to find the house full of other people 
who had dropped in for no reason that he could 
see except to congratulate each other on the fact 
that it was Christmas. Will Freeman and two 
other boys who were home from college for the holi¬ 
days took up Dagmar’s attention to such an extent 
that, in spite of his natural ingeniousness, he was 
unable to murmur even one tender word in her ear. 
He did, however, manage to fix her eyes in a long 
affectionate look which he hoped was passionate and 
soulful, as she handed him a cup of tea. ‘'What’s 
that for ?” she asked. “To be filed as a cross-refer¬ 
ence to our discussion last night, ” he told her. Con¬ 
vinced that he had done all he could, he soon after¬ 
ward took his leave. 

Their acquaintance, he felt, justified him in mak¬ 
ing, that evening, a very tense thing of their fare¬ 
well. He had come with his mother to his grand¬ 
mother’s for Christmas, but was leaving late that 
night for Chicago. When he found that Dagmar 
expected to attend a party in company with Will 
Freeman, he saw that there was only one thing to do, 
and that was to insist on taking her away from the 
house so the fellow couldn’t find her. They went 


no 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


to a club and talked about the extreme aristocracy 
of Dagmar and Pal, and the extreme ignobleness of 
the rest of the diners. The Hois and the Pollois 
aroused Pal’s disgust even while he pitied them, 
and he favored making all Hois wear a uniform so 
that they wouldn’t offend the sight with the bad 
taste of their costumes. Dagmar then proclaimed 
herself a Hoi, but Pal said this was impossible be¬ 
cause she was with him and he was emphatically not 
a Polloi. “ The Prince may stoop to a peasant, ” said 
Dagmar. “In which case the Prince always kisses 
the peasant very soundly,” responded Pal, and the 
discussion was on again. But Dagmar persisted in 
her curious refusal, and a very sulky and disgruntled 
Pal climbed on the ten-o’clock train for Chicago, 
while Dagmar, who had telephoned Willard Freeman, 
went on to a party, wondering why she hadn’t kissed 
the handsome boy and with a little pang in her heart, 
because it was so very uncertain when she would 
see him again. 


CHAPTER TEN 




ONWARD AND UPWARD AND ONWARD . . . 

Dagmar, half dozing, sat uncomfortably in a stiff 
straight chair. She was a guest at one of the more 
virulent forms of afternoon tea. A woman lecturer, 
fat hands clasped on a little platform made of her 
chubby stomach, beamed and swayed with cheerful 
respectability while she told of the splendid work of 
an organization in Chicago of which she was the 
invaluable head. 

It was early in January, and to Dagmar the future 
looked as bleak as the day, which was an extremely 
dismal one. Twenty-one years old, thought Dag¬ 
mar, and I ’ ve never done a single thing in my whole 
life. I will not marry—as she thought of Will Free¬ 
man—unless something wonderful and romantic 
should happen, she finished, thinking of Palomon 
Bennett. She was more dissatisfied than she had 
ever been in her life. The exciting novelty of hold¬ 
ing a job was gone. Exhausting as she had found 
her duties and lacking in excitement, there had still 
been a stimulus in making a daily appearance and 
the sight of a nebulous goal. The thing to do, she 
thought, is to go to New York, or some other large 


in 


112 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


city. She could study music and become a concert 
pianist. It might be fun to be an artist and wear a 
smock. New York was the place. New York or 
Chicago. Chicago and Palomon Bennett were so en¬ 
tangled in Dagmar’s mind that with an unusual and 
uncharacteristic attack of maidenliness she hastily 
decided on New York. 

The lecturer went on and on. Dagmar was tor¬ 
tured because she had to keep awake. Most of her 
audience were listening to her words with eager 
attention. And she, with perfect aplomb and im¬ 
mense self-assurance, was telling them all about 
herself. 

The audience, she had said as she came forward 
to greet them, reminded her of a little story. She 
told the story. The audience was amused. It rip¬ 
pled out polite little gurgles of pleased sound. The 
story, Mrs. Jones said (she was the well-known Mrs. 
Nella Jones of Chicago), reminded her of something 
she always said. She told what she always said, and, 
leaning forward from the waist, became unexpectedly 
earnest. The women’s faces instantly reflected a 
visible improvement, both moral and mental. 

Mrs. Jones had come to St. Paul at the request of 
several public-spirited women who wanted to hear 
all about her work in “The Chicago School Lover’s 
League.” She was making the schools into com- 


ONWARD AND UPWARD . . 


113 

munity centres organizing the parents and teachers, 
and had an auxiliary to aid boys and girls to get 
part-time employment. Thus she enabled those who 
otherwise would have had to stop school at four¬ 
teen to get at least two years of high school. Her 
motto was: “Reach the child and you reach the 
world.” She hoped to be able to change the entire 
city of Chicago in twenty years by getting in touch 
with—here she always smiled benevolently, the 
mother smile—“the young people.” 

By the time Mrs. Jones had arrived at “Reach 
the child and you reach the world, ” she might have 
been said to have been fully launched. A number of 
quotations, more or less apt, from Robert W. Service 
and Alfred Tennyson, were incorporated; a beautiful 
little poem by Edgar A. Guest, about the value of a 
child’s thoughts, was recited; a few humorous anec¬ 
dotes from Mrs. Jones’s personal experience, a refer¬ 
ence to her own beloved boy made up the lighter 
side of her speech. But this was not all. The 
practical side of her work was fully revealed. She 
had offices, she said. The women nodded. They 
would have offices, too, if they took up the work. 
And she had a corps of bright, sweet, wholesome, 
interested young girls working for her. “It would 
do your heart good to see them,” said Mrs. Jones. 
They were investigators and organizers. They went 



LAZY LAUGHTER 


114 

into the school districts and organized clubs through 
the schools. The children adored them. They or¬ 
ganized girl scout’s clubs, dancing classes, dramatic 
clubs (one of them was a talented actress who had 
given many public readings). In short, these girls 
did whatever they could to bring the children to¬ 
gether in wholesome fun that would keep them off 
the streets and away from the dance-halls. (Here 
Mrs. Jones pursed her lips, refolded her hands, and 
shook a frowning, knowing-looking head at her audi¬ 
ence, many of whom also sighed knowingly.) Dance- 
halls, they all seemed to breathe despairingly. 

Dagmar had dozed and she woke with a start at 
the sound of “Roger’s Park” on the speaker’s lips. 
Instantly Dagmar was wide awake. Pal lived in 
Roger’s Park. Mrs. Jones was relating the experi¬ 
ences of one of her splendid young assistants in the 
Roger’s Park school. This girl had been very suc¬ 
cessful with a new idea which was to organize eighth- 
grade alumnae associations, thus binding together 
children who would otherwise drift apart. The or¬ 
ganization had received funds to carry this work into 
all the schools, and she was returning to Chicago to 
begin the matter on a wider scale, taking on more 
girls, keeping, as she said, “more closely to the 
grindstone than ever.” She smiled bravely. 

The opportunity and the inspiration came to 


ONWARD AND UPWARD . . 


ii5 

Dagmar simultaneously. Why couldn’t she be one 
of those new girls ? Chicago ? There at least, in a 
new place, a big place, something worth while might 
happen. She, too, might reach the children and 
change the world in twenty years. Her heart raced 
violently, and she saw herself in a nurse’s uniform 
putting away with dignity a huge gold crown. The 
picture was vague and fleeting, but it implied that 
from now on Dagmar Hallowell would put away the 
tawdry magnificence of a spectacular career in favor 
of the more wonderful one of service to humanity. 

She approached Mrs. Jones while the tea-drinking 
was going on and the women were retelling to each 
other their fragmentary impressions of the lecture. 
“I’ve been so interested in your talk, Mrs. Jones,” 
said Dagmar. Mrs. Jones said afterward that she 
was instantly delighted with Dagmar’s fresh youth. 
Her capacity for the enjoyment of fresh youth was 
that day, as always, unlimited. Dagmar invited 
her to dine with her before catching her train back 
to Chicago, and she was delighted again. 

By telephoning, Dagmar was able to get the Pat- 
lock limousine. Mrs. Jones stepped in, her fat self- 
assurance suffering a not quite visible shock at the 
sight of car and chauffeur. Her facile mind took a 
tremendous leap, and she pictured Dagmar as an 
American Princess. But Dagmar herself, aside from 


n6 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


any background, would have impressed Mrs. Jones 
as being the daughter of millions, for she had in¬ 
herited the invisible shrug of Charles Montgomery, 
an intangible air which had its effect, even on Mrs. 
Jones. 

They dined at a respectable club. Mrs. Jones 
talked. Dagmar plied her with food and listened. 
Finally, with the girlish wholesomeness that was the 
key-note of her characterization that night, Dagmar 
asked if she couldn’t come to Chicago and be one of 
the girls who were going to help in organizing the 
eighth-grade alumnae associations. “You see,” said 
Dagmar seriously. “I feel that I could help so 
much in my own city if I had had the opportunity 
of working first under you.” 

This went, as Mrs. Jones said, straight to her 
heart. Civic love, it was; the desire to be of service. 
These were the things that counted. And while, 
of course, it was customary to take girls who were 
college graduates and had had some training in 
social service, the thing that really mattered, as 
Mrs. Jones said she always said, was the personality 
of the girl. 

Dagmar agreed to report to her in Chicago on the 
following Monday morning. 

One of those absurd opportunities for melodrama 
that chance sometimes offers occurred to Dagmar 


ONWARD AND UPWARD ... 117 

when she came to tell her family about her con¬ 
templated departure. 

As an aftermath of a public appearance the day 
before, Etholla had developed an acute attack of 
her current disease and had insisted upon having 
the doctor called in the middle of the night. This 
annoyed not only the doctor, who had recently 
taken her case, but also John Patlock, who made 
himself disagreeable and insisted upon every member 
of the household getting down to breakfast. 

There was some confusion in consequence. Mar¬ 
garet went through a caricature of her usual morn¬ 
ing activities, sputtering, “perfectly ridiculous, per¬ 
fectly ridiculous,” and sat with enormous dignity 
at the head of the table. 

“There’s too dam much laziness in this family, 
anyway,” John grumbled. Margaret raised her eye¬ 
brows slightly, and it irritated him still more because 
he knew that it meant that she considered him ill 
bred. He continued in the spirit of harmless nagging 
with which so many husbands decorate a morning 
meal: “Whole family is lazy, and you know it. 
Have to watch for it in Dagmar. Your father was 
a very charming old gentleman, but you know as well 
as I do that he never did a stroke of work in his life. 
Etholla is everlastingly in bed for just one reason. 
She’s too darned lazy to get up. And what with 


n8 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Herbie being fired from a dozen schools for nothing 
but refusing to get up in the mornings-’ ’ 

This was Dagmar’s opportunity. She rose to 
leave the table, gently glad of the theatrical possibili¬ 
ties that might develop. “I cannot listen to any 
more,” she said. “You can say all you please 
about my aunt Etholla, and my mother is your 
wife, so I suppose it gives you some rights over her, 
but when you come to making remarks about my 
brother Herbert, I leave this roof! I’m taking the 
train to-night for Chicago !” 

John Patlock’s jaw dropped open. He was very 
fond of Dagmar and did not blame her for her dis¬ 
appointment because Herbert was not learning to 
despise the middle west at an Eastern university 
instead of enjoying the climate of Haiti as an en¬ 
listed man in the Marine Corps. It was certainly 
not his fault that Herbert had enlisted, and the refer¬ 
ence to Chicago confused him completely. 

Dagmar, still preserving her grand manner, dis¬ 
closed her plan for supporting herself in the future. 
John Patlock, to her surprise, approved the idea. 
“Look here, Dagmar, if you want to go to Chicago 
and work, I’m for you. I’d like to see you amount 
to something, because I think you’ve got it in you, 
and this damned society business is no kind of life 
for a girl.” Here Margaret shuddered. “You can 



ONWARD AND UPWARD ... n 9 

always call on”—he hesitated and wished he had 
the courage to say, your daddy—“me for money. 
You know that this is your home and always will be 
as long as you want it.” Facile tears stood in his 
kind eyes, and he took a hasty swallow of coffee and 
left the room abruptly, dropping his napkin on the 
floor as he went. 

“Daddy,” called Dagmar, “you’re one peach and 
I didn’t mean it about Herbie. You’ve always 
been wonderful to both of us.” It came to his ears 
through a monotony of “perfectly ridiculous, per¬ 
fectly ridiculous,” from his wife. 

It was settled then, for Margaret had the feeblest 
authority over Dagmar, and that night (it was Satur¬ 
day) found Dagmar incredibly ensconced in a Pull¬ 
man. “A working girl can’t afford luxuries,” she 
told the protesting Will Freeman, who was telling 
Margaret somewhat bitterly that he thought Dag¬ 
mar, if she must run about the country alone, might 
at least have been put in a compartment. 

“If you don’t get off the train you’ll compromise 
me,” said Dagmar when she had kissed the appro¬ 
priately tearful Margaret good-by. She looked in¬ 
to his eyes, which were clouded with a vague pain. 
“I’m sure it’s going to start right away.” 

“Dagmar, don’t go,” he said incoherently. “ Stay 
here—” and added almost shyly “with me.” Then 


120 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


as if realizing the absurdity of his words, he shot 
the floor with his stick, exploded a “Well!” and 
put out his hand for “Good-by,” leaving Dagmar 
wondering. 


BOOK TWO 


THE CONTINUOUS LULL 


0 






CHAPTER ONE 


BOARDING-HOUSE 

The luncheon was unlike any that Dagmar had 
ever attended. A dining-room of the type used by 
suburbanites without too much money, enlarged and 
glorified, was attached to the larger public dining¬ 
room of one of the Chicago department stores. Here 
sat about twenty earnest women addressing each 
other with polite respect and heavily weighing each 
other’s opinions. None of the frivolous chatter, the 
dangling of bags, the powdering of noses that Dag¬ 
mar associated with a luncheon. These women were 
in earnest about things. Not in earnest about just 
one thing, but in earnest about everything. They 
hoped to abolish a spectacular bogey idiomatically 
referred to as the crime wave; they believed that 
they would be able to bring about a complete state 
of prohibition; they thought, even before they heard 
her talk, that Mrs. Jones was doing a splendid work. 

The youngest woman present would not be bad- 
looking if she would use a lip-stick, Dagmar thought. 
She looked a bit anaemic somehow, but a bit of 
rouge would fix that in a minute. She was the type 
of young woman who is known as “wholesome,” 

123 


124 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


however, having gone in for athletics heavily in 
school. Her ambition was to make her husband 
rise at two o’clock every Sunday morning and wait 
in line at the public golf-links in order to be able to 
begin to play at six. 

She interested Dagmar because she was the only 
person there who came even faintly within any 
orbit Dagmar had ever touched. The rest were 
middle-aged middle-class women, whose aims were 
so different from those of Dagmar as to be almost 
inconceivable to her. Her heart sank as she looked 
across at the smiling face of her protector, Mrs. 
Jones, fairly bursting with good-will. On her cheeks 
tiny veins, that looked as if they had been scrawled 
in red ink, were deepening as she heartily ate, drank, 
talked, and beamed. She is my only friend, thought 
Dagmar sadly, in all the city. The day before a cool 
feminine voice had informed her over the telephone 
that Palomon Bennett was out of town. The voice 
was not at all interested to learn that Miss Dagmar 
Hallo well of St. Paul was in the city, though it ad¬ 
mitted belonging to Palomon’s mother. Dagmar 
hung up the phone with the baffled impression that 
for some reason Mrs. Bennett disapproved of her. 
As a matter of fact, the older woman feared and 
dreaded the time when she should lose her only son 
to such an extent that she discouraged all young 


BOARDING-HOUSE 


125 


women whenever the opportunity came. Though 
she knew very well who Dagmar was, having passed 
her own girlhood in St. Paul, she did not feel it neces¬ 
sary to extend any hospitality to Dagmar, as the 
families had never been at all intimate. 

The food is terrible here, Dagmar thought, and 
smiled as she thought of the horror that Margaret 
would feel if she could have seen her daughter in 
such a place. And they’d be just as thunderstruck 
if they saw Margaret smoking through her meal, 
she thought, and glowed with self-appreciation to 
think that she, Dagmar, was broad-minded enough 
to understand both points of view. 

The emotion was momentary and unrecognized 
as such, for the women had become extremely warm 
over the question of whether their next meeting 
should be held in the Woman’s Pantry Club or a 
place called the Illinois Grill. When the Woman’s 
Pantry Club had carried the day, the young woman 
whose lips Dagmar had wanted to rouge arose and 
introduced the first speaker, who was president of a 
league to enforce prohibition. 

“Oh, God,” thought Dagmar dismally, resorting 
in her despair to the language of the movies. The 
skin of the woman’s neck hung down in leathery 
yellow folds, and though her hat was much too far 
on the back of her head, she looked around with 


126 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


great self-possession and included the company in 
what Dagmar in a letter to Will Freeman called 
“a ghastly smile.” 

“What am I going to do?” thought Dagmar. “ Is 
this what I have come to Chicago for ? Am I to be 
thrown with an endless horde of such unbelievable 
atrocities as these people ? No, no, I came to 
work, to really work for the first time in my life, 
and such affairs as these will have little to do with 
my job.” 

Mrs. Jones in the goodness of her heart and the 
natural desire to let such an appreciative listener as 
Dagmar hear her speech again had invited Dagmar 
to be her companion at the luncheon. Glad to be 
released of her duty, which that morning had con¬ 
sisted of staring at a large map of the city of Chicago 
hung on the wall, Dagmar had accepted. 

The air in the room where the map hung had been 
very bad. Dagmar was to learn the names of the 
streets, the divisions of the city that the School 
Lover’s League had made, the names of all the 
grammar-schools, and also of a dozen welfare or¬ 
ganizations already functioning in the city. Each 
one had been represented on the map by a large pin 
with a colored head. She had grown very sleepy 
staring at the map. 

Dagmar felt the eye of the speaker rest on her w T ith 


BOARDING-HOUSE 


127 


a sort of didactic severity. Lovely woman, she was 
saying, was neglecting her time-honored profession 
of being an ‘ 'influence.” The mere fact that women 
are men’s political equals w r as no reason why they 
should give up the faculty of charm, she said. The 
pupils of her eyes, Dagmar noted, w T ere so faded and 
the whites so discolored that it was difficult to tell 
where one began and the other left off. Indeed, 
went on the speaker, this was the very thing that 
the opposers of suffrage had feared. But—and 
here the speaker shook her forefinger and smiled 
until her heavy skin was crumpled and lined with 
ruts like carriage-tracks on a muddy road—the 
women would show them ! 

Small soft laughs and a sympathetic smile of in¬ 
terchange between the members of her small audi¬ 
ence encouraged her. She went on to say that it 
was her own idea, that if the women of the city, the 
club-women, the mothers—in fact, women of the 
better type—would attend all court sessions, their 
mere presence would lend an incalculable influence 
for good. Criminals would then see how the women 
feel about their deeds, and who knows how many a 
young boy, seeing a tender woman’s face in court 
that might have been his mother’s, would turn away 
from the path he was treading and go once more 
along the pathway of truth. 



128 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


The serious note. The luncheon looked at one 
another with tightened lips, nodding. 

Who knew, asked the speaker, what tremendous 
potentialities for good this thought might contain. 
This idea, once started by the club-women of Chi¬ 
cago (and she was trying to reach all the clubs), 
might spread all over the world. “Now, it is a 
fact,” she said, and paused the better to emphasize 
the surprise she was about to give them, “that the 
Eighteenth Amendment is treated with levity in some 
homes; in some families, and I do not exaggerate, my 
friends, when I say that even some of these families 
contain young boys and girls, there are stills operat¬ 
ing. Yes, stills operating! Now the moment you 
begin to make light of one law the others are all 
inevitably doomed. Is it any wonder that crime 
stalks rampant through the city? I tell you that 
this crime wave is not due at all to men out of jobs 
on the point of starvation, for I believe that there is 
some propaganda to that effect, but solely to the 
fact that the better class of people, and especially 
the better class of women, have allowed the Eigh¬ 
teenth Amendment to be made light of. 

“And let me say again that you can’t make light 
of one law unless you want all laws to be aban¬ 
doned.” 

Dagmar had a vague passing thrill as she listened, 


BOARDING-HOUSE 


129 


for the idea that these somewhat ugly women, most 
of whom were devoid of natural teeth, would be 
scarcely more thrilling to young criminals, even 
though motherless, than they were to her, did not 
trouble her. She thought, as a matter of fact, noth¬ 
ing at all, but merely caught the contagion that 
went around the table as these women for an instant 
visualized themselves as the saviors of society. Per¬ 
haps some intangible reminiscence of Florence Night¬ 
ingale in the back of the collective mind of all of 
them agitated the air. They all sat up and began 
to babble . . honest lives . . . they don’t get a 
chance . . . just like your own boy, my, my!” 
And a delicious shiver went through those mothers 
who could visualize their own offspring in the dock. 
They shook their heads and signed a resolution 
eagerly. Dagmar signed and was visited for an 
instant with a dream of Pal being tried for something 
blood-curdling while she, appropriately clad, smiled 
at him and made him realize how wonderful she was. 
A vision somewhat beside the point, but equally as 
satisfactory to Dagmar as if it had been an acute 
and pointed commentary. 

She applauded politely and listened with an inter¬ 
ested air to Mrs. Jones without actually hearing 
anything she said. This gift was to prove conve¬ 
nient to Dagmar in her intercourse with her em- 


130 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


ployer, for she went to many luncheons and a 
number of dinners, and also heard very often the 
same rather limited vocabulary, repeating the same 
respectable ideas to the staff of girls—and not a few 
times did she ride along on the elevated railroad 
while the slow metronymic beat of them lost noth¬ 
ing because they were oracularly delivered to an 
audience of one. 

And so Dagmar became very popular with Mrs. 
Nella Jones. 

When the luncheon was finished, and an amazing 
amount of personal compliments had been ex¬ 
changed, Dagmar found herself alone with Mrs. 
Jones, who, in her extreme anxiety about Dagmar’s 
happiness and her fear of Dagmar’s loneliness, sug¬ 
gested that she go over to the Blackstone Hotel, 
where she had imprudently registered, and take her 
baggage to a boarding-house which Mrs. Jones had 
thoughtfully selected. “I know you are worn out 
and tired with the excitement of your first day, and 
anxious to get settled, so you had better stop work 
for the day and go to this boarding place, which I 
am sure you will find wonderfully pleasant.” 

Leaning back wearily in the taxicab which she 
took from the Blackstone to the boarding-house, the 
events since her arrival whirled around and around, 
presenting themselves with an annoying persistence 


BOARDING-HOUSE 131 

that would not let her think the tranquil and quiet¬ 
ing thoughts she wanted to think. The small room 
at the Blackstone which had soothed her on her 
arrival with its comfortable promise of a bath, break¬ 
fast in bed, and a telephone close at hand to put her 
in close connection with Pal. And the voice of Mrs. 
Bennett would come to her again, “Palomon Ben¬ 
nett is not in the city at present.” Then the lonely 

i 

hours of Sunday; her miserable luncheon by herself 
in the strange hotel; the solitary walk down the 
avenue blown like a piece of waste paper by the cold 
lake breeze and unheeded as a stray dog by the 
people hurrying past with their coat collars round 
their ears: each picture presented itself and she 
smiled a little wanly as she remembered that she had 
gone to the movies and cried through a number of 
scenes that under normal circumstances would have 
roused a disdainful amusement. Her nerves were 
in much the same condition now after the excite¬ 
ment of her day, but that morning she had risen en¬ 
thusiastically to meet her first day at the School 
Lover’s League. The marble-floored lobby, with its 
peanut and cigar stand, its telephone-booth, and 
amateur looking lunch-counter presented itself to 
her mind’s eye again and again. She had sailed 
through it magnificently, head up, and flirted into 
the elevator with a movement that she thought very 


132 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


businesslike. The dizzy sensation of the elevator 
came to her again, for at the back of the shaft large 
windows gave her the faintly terrifying vista of the 
city receding as the car travelled up to the nine¬ 
teenth story. 

If only these pictures would stop coming. If she 
could think of something pleasant, like Pal, perhaps 
she would feel better. Where was Pal, anyway? 
She straightened up and opened her eyes, for they 
had filled with tears. 

The district through which they were passing 
reminded her of the costumes of the women with 
whom she had lunched; the colors of the houses, 
which even in their pristine state could never have 
been pleasing to the eye, were now so battered by 
dust and years that they seemed to exist for no 
reason except that they had determined to do so. 
And nothing could be done about it. White paint 
wouldn’t help the houses any more than rouge would 
help the women. They were all unbeautiful through 
and through, to her superficial and youthful eyes. 
And to her horror, the cab had jolted to a stop before 
one of the most unpleasant of them all. 

The undertakerial exterior of the boarding-house 
looked dusty and lugubrious, for a thaw had melted 
part of the snow, leaving the remainder gray and 
crumpled-looking like soiled laundry thrown about. 


BOARDING-HOUSE 


i 33 


The gray and dismal tan of the grass plot which 
fronted it was ugly in the afternoon sunlight and 
defiant of the soft exhilarating air, almost spring¬ 
like, which the Chicago climate has no scruples in 
sending as either a postlude or prelude to an all- 
encompassing blizzard. 

The interior was equally funereal. Gray-green 
going toward brown was the dominating note epito¬ 
mized in a carving, in rich golden oak, of the late 
Theodore Roosevelt in profile. 

‘Mrs. Jones spoke to me about you,” said the 
woman who came to meet Dagmar. She was cush¬ 
ioned even more completely than Mrs. Jones her¬ 
self, shielded by mounds of flesh at every conceiv¬ 
able point and equally as motherly. 

If the house was colorless, Dagmar found that 
her own room made up for it. The kalsomined walls 
made her gape as she opened the door, for the room 
was a dazzling effulgence of blue. 

At dinner Dagmar met the eleven other young 
women who dwelt there. As Mrs. Jones had proph¬ 
esied, they were to the last girl utterly interested 
in everything—especially if they thought it would 
improve them. Dagmar, who thought that nothing 
would improve them, was soon avoided by all of 
them as an insufferable and slightly peculiar snob. 
But that first night she talked of choral societies, of 



134 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


the more pallid athletics, of the college girl’s respon¬ 
sibility as a moral uplifter and the effect on the fe¬ 
male constitution of cigarette smoking. 

Existence here would be impossible, she decided; 
and very far from anything she had rosily imagined. 
It might have been more bearable if she had been 
able to spin the merry stuff of farce from her raw 
material, as she certainly would have done, if it had 
not been so appallingly serious. Her employer ex¬ 
pected her to live there! And she had not the 
slightest idea how to find another place unless she 
went to a hotel. 

She went to bed forlornly, almost ready to give up 
and go back to St. Paul. But the morning brought 
her a renewed sense of adventure only slightly 
dampened by finding that there was no hot water for 
a bath. She swung out of the house hopefully and 
joined the morning crowds on the street-cars for work. 

As she looked at the girls in their early-morning 
costumes, sleepy, disgruntled, too evidently dis¬ 
turbed because they could not find seats, she thought 
of Pal and his theory that working girls should all 
wear costumes. She could glimpse a girl who wore 
a pair of archaic high-heeled, laced white-kid shoes, 
a black-lace hat, and a flimsy blue and slinky dress of 
indeterminate material. The girl had one of those 
countenances that appear in some curious way to 


BOARDING-HOUSE 


i 35 


be both weak and hard, perhaps because they wear 
no particular expression, but are lined with an un¬ 
pleasing grimness. The frizz of blonde artificially 
curled hair, inevitable accompaniment of such faces, 
of such costumes, was there, and it suddenly occurred 
to Dagmar, who had been pitying the girl with utter 
detachment that she looked not unlike Margaret’s 
intimate, Adele Fremeer. She giggled. “I bet 
Adele used to look like that at afternoon functions 
ten years ago.” For she had estimated that the 
costume was approximately that many years out of 
date. 

At the office she found a letter from Margaret en¬ 
closing a letter from Pal, which was hastily written 
from New York. He had been sent down there by 
his firm, it seemed, and might stay there indefinitely. 
It contained an ambiguous hint that he hoped Dag¬ 
mar would not mind living in New York and was 
signed with love. 

She was more sentimental than she had ever been 
in her life as she shut herself up with the map that 
morning. She focussed her attention on an orange- 
colored pin and then on a black one, but the effect 
was undoubtedly soporific. She had had plenty of 
sleep the night before, but she longed to stretch out 
on a couch with Pal’s letter under her pillow and 
think about him for a long while. 


CHAPTER TWO 


HUNEKER OF THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 

“Don’t overwork yourself, my flower,” said the 
blithsome Mrs. Jones, “remember that even the 
sun needs rest.” 

Dagmar drooped in her hard, stiff, official chair. 
Dagmar Hallo well, the school organizer, looking deli¬ 
cately wilted (an appearance she always achieved 
when she was bored), was dictating her first weekly 
report to the stenographer: 

“Monday I spent in learning the map of Chicago. 
I attended a luncheon given by the Women’s Chi¬ 
cago Improvement Association. Tuesday-” 

“Would you want to mention that you heard a 
number of interesting talks,” suggested the demure 
and exquisitely dressed stenographer who unosten¬ 
tatiously corrected Dagmar’s report and admired 
her enormously. 

“I suppose I ought to ?” said Dagmar inquiringly. 

... In the afternoon I went out to the stock- 
yards and talked to Miss Helen Scott, a former social 
worker in the district.” Dagmar sighed. Her tre¬ 
mendous industry was beginning to pall as a diver¬ 
sion, and she wished that she knew of some attrac- 

136 



HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 137 


tive person to lunch with. Not one even faintly- 
amusing person had she met since her advent, and 
she thought sceptically of the girls who visited in 
Chicago and reported “wonderful times.” There 
were several friends of the family in the city, but 
none of the ones who had visited in St. Paul had 
roused any particular interest in Dagmar. 

The large competent workers, whom Mrs. Jones 
introduced as her other chicks, smiled at Dagmar in 
a friendly way, but appeared to be too busy to seek 
her acquaintance. The girls at the boarding-house 
showed a similar busyness, garnished with a little 
hostility. For the first time in her life she was 
completely lonely. Her evenings that week had 
been spent in suffering one or two minor rebuffs from 
the badly dressed girls in the boarding-house and in 
writing long letters to all her friends. 

“On Wednesday morning I began making the 
rounds of the schools,” went on Dagmar drearily, 
and in struggling to find a verb to fit in the next long 
meandering sentence, she discovered that she had a 
headache, a backache, and a faint nausea. “I think 
I’ll stop for to-day,” she said faintly. And Mrs. 
Jones’s hearty, “Poor child you’ve been doing too 
much,” shamed and reassured her at once, and she 
put on her hat and left the building. 

The office of the School Lover’s League closed at 


138 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


noon on Saturday, and Dagmar realized that she 
faced the prospect of a lonely afternoon and a still 
more lonely Sunday. She tramped the streets and 
spent a fairly cheerful hour trying on gowns she had 
no intention of buying, but it was lonesome work, and 
when finally she telephoned the residence of a friend 
of Margaret’s and found that the family had gone to 
Florida, she wept and went wearily home to fling 
herself across her narrow hard bed and fall hope¬ 
lessly asleep. 

Her second week at work found her making a 
regular appearance at the office at noon. The pre¬ 
sumption of Mrs. Jones that her mornings were 
spent in interviewing school principals was incor¬ 
rect. She was in bed. In the third week, though she 
guiltily thought it scandalous if she slept until ten, 
her inner consciousness whispered that it would be 
futile for her to try to get up in the morning. Once 
or twice, with magnificent bravery, she did get up at 
nine, but more often she turned over for another 
hour. She had found that the possibilities of a hot- 
water bath were greater at ten than they were at 
eight. And her weekly report showed an amazing 
number of school principals to have been out when 
Dagmar called to talk to them about the School 
Lover’s League. 

She stayed on at the boarding-house through in- 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 


i39 


ertia. Though she still despised the clothes and 
ideas of the girls where she lived, she had a secret 
wistful longing to have them admire her. A new¬ 
comer, a little fragile and too-frank girl named Mary 
Louise Kent, sought her out the night she ar¬ 
rived and confided excitedly that she was going to 
the theatre with a very rich man who called for her 
in a taxicab, and took her to supper afterward. Dag- 
mar exerted all her charm and helped Mary Louise 
dress, thinking afterward all evening that she would 
be a friend to Mary Louise and even possibly tell 
her something about Pal (for her necessity to talk 
about him was very great). But the next day, 
Mary Louise appeared under the protection of one 
of the other girls, avoided Dagmar, and even that 
slender companionship was denied her. Again Dag¬ 
mar cried herself to sleep, wondering why the girls 
did not like her. 

Something of what she was feeling, the isolation, 
the strangeness, crept into her letters to Pal, and 
even to Will Freeman. Both answered her with in¬ 
creasing tenderness, and so, presently as she moved 
through her lazy days she lived in a continuous lull, 
hushed of unpleasantness with dreams. Her friends 
at home were dearly defined by their remembered 
virtues, and she thought of Pal in New York with 
all the accredited wistfulness of a soldier thinking of 


140 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


burning home fires, God’s country, or the loved ones 
beyond the seas. 

But a hum of amazing activity was always going 
to come on the next day, Dagmar thought. Each 
night she believed she would wake in the morning, 
vigorously perform a week’s work in three or four 
hours, and either find that Pal had unexpectedly ar¬ 
rived from New York, or else meet a number of in¬ 
teresting individuals who would fill up her days. 
This optimism kept her from going home. And 
whenever she thought of returning, the acid re¬ 
marks of those persons who had criticised her for 
leaving sounded in her ears. “Not back to St. 
Paul,” she would say to herself, for it seemed to 
her that St. Paul was mysteriously different from 
all other cities—more stupid, more given to inter¬ 
esting itself in its neighbor’s business, more willing 
to poke its finger into her pie than Toledo or Buf¬ 
falo would have been; a curious delusion that many 
people have about their own city, even as they feel 
(and often at the same time) that it is in some way 
better and finer and more “homelike” than other 
cities. So Dagmar said, “Not back to St. Paul,” 
as if she could have gone back if it had been any 
other town. 

Dagmar found an advertisement of a St. Paul firm 
that had slipped down in one of the pockets of her 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 141 


travelling bag. It was headed: “What I must do 
to-day !” and under it was written in smaller letters: 
“A ship without a chart gets lost in the ocean.” Un¬ 
derneath were lines drawn in ink in which might be 
written a complete schedule of any one’s intended 
activities for one day. This seemed to be what 
Dagmar had been looking for all her life. She im¬ 
mediately sat down and wrote out a schedule for the 
following day, which after a few erasures was satis¬ 
factory. 

A. M. 

7 Rise, bathe, dress, mending. 

8 Breakfast. 

8:30 to 12:30 Visit schools. 

12:30 Luncheon. 

P. M. 

I to 3 Visit schools. 

3 to 4 Office work. 

5 Walk home. 

6 Dine. 

7 to 11 Recreation. 

II Bed. 

She went to bed eager for the new day to begin 
that she might try her schedule. She awakened the 
next morning at a quarter of eight, sleepily remem¬ 
bered her schedule, thought dismally that she would 


142 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


be unable to mend a slight hole in her only clean 
pair of stockings because the time for “ mending ” 
had gone by. “Why didn’t I do it last night ?” she 
thought with some dismay but remembered that the 
evening hours were spent in “recreation.” She 
lay wondering what she would do about her schedule 
and letting some of the tired wrinkles come slowly 
out of her body as if the bed had been a big soothing 
iron and she a piece at the laundry. She looked at 
the clock and saw that it was eight-thirty. “That’s 
impossible,” she said; “only a few moments ago it 
was a quarter of eight.” She sighed, and turned 
over, “my schedule is shot,” she thought with re¬ 
gret. “And it was such a sensible schedule with 
everything in it just right.” Her eyes closed and she 
lay motionless until nine-thirty, when she began to 
be a little tired of lying in bed, and quite cheerful 
at the prospect of getting up. Her bath took place 
at ten o’clock, and she thought that it was much 
better to have a hot bath than it would have been to 
have plunged into cold water, for it was a chilly, dis¬ 
agreeable day and she could hear the Chicago wind 
howling about the house as ardently as if it had been 
a wolf wailing at the door of an arctic trading-post. 
“A cold bath on most mornings,” she told herself, 
“would be the best thing in the world for me.” It 
seemed somehow more heroic and businesslike. It 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 143 


might be an interesting note to add: Dagmar never 
took a cold bath during all the months of her stay 
in Chicago. 

The boarding-house breakfast was served between 
eight and nine. Dagmar’s schedule planned to have 
her down at the dining-room door just as it opened. 
Dagmar never saw that door open. And few were 
the mornings when she breakfasted in there at all. 
As on this morning, she came down too late and went 
out to a tea shop for breakfast. 

After breakfast she boarded the elevated railway 
almost empty at this time of the morning, for the 
day’s crowds had long since gone into the city, and 
dreamed her way through the city, carried by an 
obscure sense of rhythm, vaguely charmed by the 
changing pictures beneath her. At these moments 
she would reach a secure and definite kind of hap¬ 
piness which was unconscious, because the moment 
she thought enough about herself to realize her 
actual situation she was troubled and disturbed. 

Beneath her a tenement back-yard would give 
place to a gray and filthy acreage of tin cans, but, 
chin propped on hand in utter bodily comfort and 
swayed by a motion as soothing as the rocking of a 
cradle, she would think of incidents, real and imagi¬ 
nary, so amusing as to cause her to smile, or so senti¬ 
mental as to bring small, brightening tears to her 


144 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


eyes. Very often she pretended that Pal was her 
companion, and the astonished and belated passen¬ 
gers would be edified with the sight of a very pretty 
girl, slouched down in her seat, with her lips moving, 
her eyes smiling while she gazed unseeingly out of the 
window. 

Warm and comfortable and happy, she always got 
off the elevated railway reluctantly, and on this 
morning the air which swept her from the station 
platform was raw and shocking to her pampered 
nerves. She felt a sensation of dizziness as she 
stepped from the car to the platform, a sinking of 
the heart, and a swift dream of falling which be¬ 
wildered her and made her reach for a rail to which 
she could cling. She descended fearfully, for she 
could never overcome the feeling that she might be 
swept to the ground at any moment. 

And now began her search through the stock-yards 
district for the unfamiliar streets. On all sides were 
low squalid houses with here and there an enormous 
institution, either public or commercial. Over every¬ 
thing was the sickening, powerful smell of the yards. 
Foreigners gaped at her stupidly, and when she 
stopped to ask directions of one of them, he shook 
his head at her wonderingly and answered in an un¬ 
familiar tongue. She boarded the wrong street-car, 
a not unusual proceeding with her, and travelled 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 145 


dreary blocks before she found it out. She was 
forced to get out on a windy corner and walk back 
two blocks against a staggering wind, thinking, as she 
walked that the School Lover’s League ought to fur¬ 
nish cabs, that Chicago conducters should all be dis¬ 
charged for incompetence, that some one ought to 
invent something to bridle the wind; as always, quite 
unable to realize that there are some disagreeable 
things in life that even the young members of the 
human race have never been able to eradicate. 

But suddenly, as if she had been guided there by 
a kind guardian spirit, she saw a huge ugly grammar- 
school looming before her. “Prizman School,” she 
read, and knew that though this was not the school 
she had been searching for, it was one of the institu¬ 
tions on her list. 

She came in out of the cold with a feeling of having 
seen a miracle performed, for this building had ap¬ 
peared almost in answer to a prayer. “I couldn’t 
have walked another step,” said Dagmar, and drew 
a long, sickening breath of the overheated and chem¬ 
ically purified air. Through the building went the 
low, purring hum of machinery, and she saw before 
her an ugly green-painted hallway and a flight of 
sand-colored stairs, muddy with that special look of 
recently scrubbed stairs soiled by a hundred small 
feet. 


146 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


She was tired after her battle with the wind and 
inexpressibly bored at the thought of walking into 
the nun-like sanctuary of the school principal, where 
awed and aging women, made anaemic by a hundred 
bloodless encounters with their superiors, in which 
they were always beaten, glided in and out with the 
hush of rubber heels and a cowed respect for the es¬ 
tablished order. 

She had made up her mind that this was the type 
of school she was entering on account of a few gen¬ 
eralizations she had made to the delight of Mrs. 
Jones, based on the schools she had already visited. 
The schools in which she found wide light stairways, 
concrete floors, and open spaces containing flower¬ 
decorated tables, were the schools, said Dagmar in 
her report, in which she found the most intelligent 
principals; i. e., the ones most open to the advances 
of the School Lover’s League. Schools of the type 
she was entering now were apt to be run by old maids 
with complexes, thought Dagmar shaking her youth¬ 
ful head with the wisdom of one who is securely above 
such things. 

She sighed and mounted a few steps to look out of 
a window like a child loitering on the way to an 
unpleasant duty. She sauntered on and examined 
an exhibit of still-life drawings in crayon. She 
yawned with a soft, ill-bred little sound and turned 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 147 

into an unattractive room marked “office.’’ It was 
empty, and so she sat down on a hard shining 
bench evidently designed to remind culprits of the 
discomforts of sin. The bare, grayish boards of the 
floor glared at her accusingly, as did the notice pep¬ 
pered walls, kalsomined a color calculated to make 
any one glance into the nearest arithmetic as a relief 
to the sense of sight. 

“My vanity is gone,” said Dagmar to herself, “it 
it not worth while in such a place even to powder 
my nose.” She sighed and looked down at her feet, 
and just then the principal, Mr. Martin Plunkitt, 
came into the room. 

In a flash she saw that he had a queer hair cut, a 
nice grin, that he was young, and that he admired 
her. 

“Organizing an eighth-grade alumni association,” 
he said when she had finished her explanation— 
“that might be great stuff.” He looked at her with 
a serious respect, which Dagmar greatly enjoyed. 

She wondered if he were married, not that she 
had even a hidden idea of marrying him herself, but 
that she believed, partly because she had read a 
great many novels and partly because she was ever 
inclined to overestimate her charms, that married 
men were, almost all, tired of their wives and prone 
to fall in love with her. For this reason she had. 


148 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


boasted to Margaret once that she never accepted 
the attentions of married men. Margaret had taken 
it as an innuendo and had flared into a violent rage. 
Dagmar thought that married women, older women, 
were at a disadvantage in the competition for men, 
and so she elaborately and very conceitedly with¬ 
drew from the field when another woman seemed 
obviously to want some man that Dagmar did not 
want. 

. An intellectual young lady like you can 
readily see,” she heard him say and realized with 
dismay that she had no idea what he had expected 
her to understand, and still less of a notion whether 
he was favorably inclined toward organizing the as¬ 
sociation she had suggested. 

'‘Yes, yes,” she said hurriedly, nodding wisely. 

“However,” he went on frowning ponderously; 
“I think a thing like that should be left to the judg¬ 
ment of the children and so you might come up¬ 
stairs to the classroom now and speak to them.” 

Dagmar had never been intimate with any chil¬ 
dren. She had no natural talents in handling chil¬ 
dren, and she felt a slight, unaccustomed embar¬ 
rassment, which she was far from showing as she 
followed Mr. Plunkitt with great dignity up about 
a hundred steps on the way to deliver her first 
speech. 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 149 

The principal faced the children with great con¬ 
descension and was rewarded with a close attention. 

This young lady has something to say to you, which 
I hope you will all consider carefully,” he said. “In 
a few months you are about to go out into the world, 
to break the ties that have held you here for eight 
years, perhaps never to see each other again. Miss 
Hallowell has a suggestion to make about that and 
she will now speak to you.” 

Dagmar rose to her feet with her knees weak under 
her as fifty pair of hard, curious eyes bored into her, 
with an expression of frozen politeness, which she 
fancied hid an enormous contempt for her personal 
appearance and a sceptical prejudice against her 
ideas before they were uttered. 

“Many of the graduating classes this year,” she 
began in sugared tones, “ are feeling, as Mr. Prizman 
—Mr. Plunkitt, suggested ...” here a boy in the 
back of the room snickered and a curious expression 
chased itself over forty-nine faces to be instantly 
repressed. “Many of the classes in the city feel 
that they will want to have some way of meeting, 
after their days at grammar-school are over; and so 
I am organizing eighth-grade alumni associations” 
(they don’t understand what those words mean, she 
thought in a panic)—“and so we are thinking of 
organizing a club.” (Do they know organizing ?) 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


150 

“You see, your class would be a club, and you could 
have meetings every week or probably every month, 
and get together and have a party or play games, 
and so you would never forget your grammar-school 
friends. Now”—she gasped for breath—“Mr. 
Plunkitt wanted me to ask you whether you would 
like to do that or not; do you think you would ?” 

Not a face moved, not a muscle twitched. Dag- 
mar sat down, feeling that this was the most miser¬ 
able failure she had ever made of anything. Mr. 
Plunkitt rose to his feet with urbanity. “All those 
who would like to organize such a club, stand up!” 
he suggested. No one stood up. “Come, come,” 
he said with a trifle of irritation. “Wouldn’t you 
like to form a club and have meetings next year, 
William?” he inquired of a long, blank-looking boy 
in the first row. “Yes, sir,” said William. William 
stood up. “Who else would like to join the club ?” 
inquired Mr. Plunkitt jovially. Half a dozen more 
children rose, and the rest looked uneasy. “I don’t 
think they understand very well,” whispered Martin 
Plunkitt. “I’ll have their teacher explain it to them 
this afternoon, and then they can vote on it.” Dag- 
mar crept shamefacedly out of the room after the 
principal. 

“If it is true,” she wrote in her report that week 
(for she was about to quote one of Mrs. Jones’s fa- 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 151 


vorite generalizations) *‘ that all men in the teaching 
profession are either petty men who like authority, or 
else very big men who are sacrificing themselves for 
the sake of education, then Mr. Martin Plunkitt, 
principal of the Prizman School, belongs to the latter 
class.” 

This sentence, put in as it was, to please Mrs. 
Jones, was more suggestive than it was actually true, 
for Dagmar was never actually able to make up her 
mind whether she had discovered in Martin a truly 
great man—“great soul” he would have said—or 
merely, as she confided to Will in a letter, “a plain 
nut.” For he was like no one that she had ever 
seen before and would not fit into any of her cate¬ 
gories. But from the moment his eyes flashed on 
her, lighting his somewhat plain face with unmis¬ 
takable admiration, Dagmar was warmed with a 

4 

real interest, a sincere interest such as she had not 
before met in Chicago. 

It was an Irish face, Dagmar thought, and yet 
there was a heaviness about Martin Plunkitt that is 
not often found in an Irishman. It was not that he 
w T as bull-necked (for he was that) but rather that his 
wits seemed to lumber heavily like a bull attempting 
to gambol about in a meadow with some frolicsome 
young colts. Dagmar learned afterward that his 
mother was German, and had perhaps given him that 


1 S 2 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


dogged persistence which he displayed, and which he 
demonstrated so futilely by trying, always trying, to 
acquire a light touch, a humor, a wit, a thing, which 
(he being incapable of nourishing a whim, or if he had 
been, of gratifying one), he called “whimsicality.” 

Martin aspired to lead the life of a James Huneker. 
Oh, to drink Pilsener at midnight with an opera star, 
or a French bandit! Or to listen to strange music 
in a curious studio in Washington Square in company 
with Paderewski, and possibly Mary Garden. Or to 
go journeying into Paris, to call himself Jim, the 
Penman; for he knew his “Steeplejack” by heart as 
only youth can know the precious volume which 
epitomizes its dreams. 

Dagmar, though, only noticed that he was more 
agreeably dressed than most principals, younger, 
and that it was nice to meet a man capable of ad¬ 
miring her after all the dreary wasted weeks. The 
look in his eyes acted like a switch, turning on the 
full flood of Dagmar’s charm. 

They had luncheon together in the penny-lunch 
room, where hundreds of eager-faced, crowding 
children stood impatiently in line waiting to get 
into their places at the long wooden benches. Every¬ 
thing, from the delicious soup to the cookies, was a 
penny, and Martin, with a vigorous thoroughness, 
explained everything to her with a correctness of 


HUNEKER—THE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 153 

phrasing that was precise, even when he threw in a 
slang phrase; it was as if he had read in a book that 
the best people used slang these days, and had de¬ 
cided to put a suitable amount into his conversation. 

Dagmar spent the day at the Prizman School, 
bored by Martin’s account of it, and slightly weary 
from climbing stairs, looking into dull sewing-rooms. 
Her enthusiasm was raised for an instant by the 
inspection of a five-room apartment in connection 
with the domestic-science classes, which, she was 
told, the advanced classes used as a laboratory for 
actual experiment. 

“They cook in the kitchen, they make the beds 
. . . .” Martin explained it to her fifty times over. 
But she enjoyed the fact that she was evidently mak¬ 
ing an impression on Martin, and so stood the physi¬ 
cal discomfort with a certain bravery, for Dagmar 
hated to be tired and in stuffy air, and felt herself to 
be tinged with the glory of the sainted martyrs when 
she tolerated them. 

They were friends when they parted and Dagmar 
had confided the dreadful story of her martyrdom 
in the dim-colored boarding-house, her lack of 
friends, and it was understood that Martin was going 
to call on her. 


CHAPTER THREE 


CAFETERIA ROMANCE 

Dagmar abandoned her schedule after a few more 
dismal attempts to live up to it. She did not delib¬ 
erately let this admirable and mathematical regula¬ 
tion of her life go, so much as she gradually forgot 
all about it. The necessity for the rigors of an 
existence unadorned by masculinity had gone, for 
Dagmar, for the first time in three weeks and five 
days (for all this time had passed since she left St. 
Paul), was engaged in the business of having a beau. 

Martin Plunkitt had telephoned her one day and 
she had noticed a lumbering kittenishness in his 
manner as he asked her if it would be convenient for 
her to see him that night. His manner was eager, 
even intimate, over the phone, probably because he 
visualized the ideal of her that Dagmar had im¬ 
printed on him without being slightly awed by her 
presence, and was able to confide to her that he recog¬ 
nized her as belonging to one of his far-flung clan. 

Dagmar was slightly puzzled, but when he came 
that night she saw that far-flung was as indispen¬ 
sable to his conversation as was the high-sounding 

154 


CAFETERIA ROMANCE 


i 55 


phrase, the mouthy sentence. He had tramped 
about the world, he said, in many countries; he had 
sweltered under many suns; which meant, as Dag- 
mar discovered later, that he had spent his summer 
vacations in travelling as a floating laborer, and was 
probably referring to the differences in weather be¬ 
tween North Dakota and Texas because he had 
never set foot outside of the United States. Martin 
was not lying, he was just carried away by words, 
for with all his aspirations toward higher things— 
“And of all aspirers,” Dagmar wrote Will, “he is the 
world’s worst!”—Martin was genuinely honest. 

Martin took Dagmar to dine at Mary’s Fish 
Palace, a basement restaurant which looked out 
upon the Chicago River and where they were served 
with a very good dinner of fried fish. Martin 
glowed with joy over the place and told Dagmar 
that he imagined a middle-class family at the next 
table were probably “second-story workers.” An¬ 
other person, he felt sure, was a poet, because his 
hair grew rather long on his neck. 

“I like this place because it has atmosphere,” said 
Martin with gusto. 4 ‘ Don ’t you ? ’ * 

Dagmar did. It was a very dim reproduction of 
what she had hoped for in the way of “Bohemia.” 
“Greenwich Village” in the city. She was about to 
reply when Martin shook himself and remembered 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


156 

that he was taking a girl out to dine and must begin 
to entertain her at once. 

“Have you ever heard the story,” he began, “of 
the farmer who was taking some hogs to market, and 
met a friend who asked him how much he expected 
to get? He replied” . . . here Martin gave a ter¬ 
rific imitation of the old farmer who had evidently 
talked in a high nasal twang. 

This was the first of a series, the flow of which 
Dagmar, who was hoping to talk about herself in a 
romantic narrative style, could not stem. Martin 
would interrupt to tell her about two Germans in a 
beer-garden and what they said to each other. For 
Martin had not suffered through an American high 
school, where the popular boys were able to turn off 
light jokes, for nothing. He had formed a few rules 
by which he lived. He also had one or two minor 
little remarks which he made while he ate: “May I 
press you to a jelly?” and “I’m clubfooted. I be¬ 
long to so many clubs !” 

Dagmar was not fond of walking. This was a 
disappointment to Martin, because walking is an 
exercise both romantic and cheap. It was a trifle 
cold to ride about on the top of a motor bus and say 
romantic things. His only recourse was to seek out 
“strange, curious” places, where the food was inex¬ 
pensive, to which to take her for dinner. 


CAFETERIA ROMANCE 


i57 


In this way he took her to a particularly stuffy 
cafeteria one night, where two somewhat wistful- 
looking boys played the piano and the violin together, 
alternating such selections as, “Humoresque,” “For¬ 
gotten,” “To a Wild Rose,” “The Rosary,” and 
“The End of a Perfect Day ” with a fast jazz, during 
which the violin was abandoned for a light drum. 
When the drum came on, people rose from all sides of 
the room and jammed themselves together on the 
floor, wriggling around as best they could in the con¬ 
fusion, presumably in time with the music, and, of 
course, paired into couples, as is the custom. Mar¬ 
tin had picked this basement cafeteria, enlivened by 
its insufficient jazz orchestra, as the theatre in which 
to tell Dagmar about his ideals and also his inmost 
dreams. The business of picking up an aluminum 
tray, a thick white plate, eating utensils wrapped in a 
rough but virgin white napkin, and walking past 
a counter where food was displayed for the purpose 
of choosing what they would eat, took up some time; 
but when they were seated cosily at a small table in a 
corner Martin began the preliminary skirmishes in 
the matter of baring his soul. 

He began by telling Dagmar that he always 
thought of her as “Eyes O’ Blue”—a title which he 
had, as a matter of fact, picked out for her with a 
great deal of mental labor. “For,” he went on in 


158 LAZY LAUGHTER 

a manner a little reminiscent of the normal-school 
debating society, of which he had been a member, 
“it seems to me often that your blue eyes are look¬ 
ing at me straight and steadily when we are apart. 
And sometimes you whisper to me.” 

“Glad I don’t appear cross-eyed,” mumbled Dag- 
mar, somewhat ashamed for Martin, whom she 
rather liked. 

It had no effect. “Yes, you’re beautiful, Eyes 0 ’ 
Blue, with the beauty of youth and strength-” 

“And a few cosmetics,” added Dagmar, deter¬ 
mined to shake him out of his absurdity. For it was 
evident, even to Dagmar (whose capability for ex¬ 
aggerating the degree of her own attraction was 
enormous) that Martin was more in love with the 
shining sentences he was delivering than he was 
with the subject of them. 

“And your rainbow humor!” said Martin, tri¬ 
umphantly inventing a phrase on the spot. “I 
would like to write a long poem about you, what you 
are doing and thinking and dreaming. I wonder. 
Do you know when I am lonely I go to a little house 
that I keep on a hill, far off over the far-flung plains. 
In my imagination I go there with the people I love 
best . . . with you, and my sister Marthena”— 
he broke off, “I wish you knew Marthena !” 

“What’s she like?” asked Dagmar, and Martin 



CAFETERIA ROMANCE 


x 59 


began a description of his sister that stirred a sym¬ 
pathetic and somewhat curious chord in Dagmar. 

In telling about his sister, Martin told something 
of his life—a life which for Dagmar did not possess 
one glimmer of beauty, romance, or even of that val¬ 
uable element which Dagmar called “a good time. ” 

She felt, as he went on, a pitying curiosity, which 
he was far from suspecting, because to him it held 
the simple romance of the Up-and-Coming, Strive- 
and-Succeed, type of fiction. 

The son of a country storekeeper, increasingly in 
debt, Martin had gone to work at the age of twelve, 
spurred on by his mother, who was filled with am¬ 
bition for all her three children. The elder Plun- 
kitt had been a genial easy soul of no great brilliancy, 
who liked to talk about Ireland, a country for which 
Martin’s German mother could only feel contempt. 

They lived above the store and were looked down 
upon in the village as a worthless lot. Martin came 
to the city, first to Joliet, Illinois, where he worked 
in a store and went to high school, and then to 
Chicago, where, through the influence of a school¬ 
teacher, he had been inspired to go into the profes¬ 
sion himself. He had got through the normal school, 
working all the time and sending money home, and 
was now supporting his mother and buying a house 
in Reliance, Illinois. 



i6o 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


His sister Marthena had gone through her first 
year at high school and had stopped at the age of 
sixteen. At first she had worked in the store, but as 
there was no money for her in that occupation, she 
had gone into another store in the town, and once 
had tried to learn stenography. But she was ambi¬ 
tious and wanted to come to Chicago and get a job. 
Martin was considering bringing her up with him. 
He had only been waiting to find some nice girl to 
be a friend to her; some one near her own age. 

He looked at Dagmar wistfully. “I’d love to meet 
her,” said Dagmar impulsively. The intrinsic wist¬ 
fulness and ingenuous desire to rise in the world, 
displayed by Martin in the narration touched a 
sympathetic chord in Dagmar; because, in spite 
of her laziness, in spite of her selfish tendencies, the 
underlying quality in Dagmar was one of dissatis¬ 
faction with herself, crossed with a vague hope that 
she would some day do something that was worth 
doing. It was this nebulous wish that had beck¬ 
oned her to Chicago quite as much as the desire for 
adventure and the hope of seeing Palomon Ben¬ 
nett. 

With all his desire to be whimsical, yet profound 
and intellectual, Martin still cherished a practical 
side to his nature, supposedly to be observed only 
in those “one hundred percenters, those forward 


CAFETERIA ROMANCE 


161 


lookers,” whom Martin had painstakingly learned 
to despise. This sense enabled him to realize that 
if any one could assist his sister Marthena in becom¬ 
ing a charming, poised, and slender hostess, it was 
Dagmar. It was like Martin to think of his sister 
in her coming happy state, not as a woman, but a 
hostess, and like him to hope for a wonderful phys¬ 
ical transformation (for she was inclined to be a 
little stout). 

“Would you really like to meet her?” asked 
Martin eagerly. 

“I’d love to,” said Dagmar sincerely, thinking 
dimly of the delightful contrast she would make to 
the rural Marthena. “I wish I could. ” 

“If you’d come home with me,” began Martin 
timidly, “I generally go home over week-ends, you 
could meet her, and my mother, too. It’s probably 
different from anything you’ve ever known and you 
might find it amusing.” The last phrase with its 
attempt at sophistication fell incongruously, as so 
many phrases did issuing from his honest and some¬ 
what stolid face. 

“Where is it?” asked Dagmar. “And how long 
does it take to get there. ” 

“About three hours,” said Martin eagerly. “It’s 
a small town, but I’m sure you will find many odd, 
strange, whimsical characters there. To a girl of 


162 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


your sort it will be almost like reading a novel by 
William J. Locke. ” 

Curiosity stirred in Dagmar to see this whimsical 
Illinois village. Anything, she reflected, would be 
better than another dismal week-end in the chill 
unfriendliness of the boarding-house. Before the 
evening was over, she had promised to visit the 
Plunkitt home in Reliance, Illinois, and to meet 
Marthena Plunkitt the next week-end. 

As she crept into bed that night the heavy loneli¬ 
ness of the room was attenuated by the thought of 
a possible new and completely adoring friend. The 
warm pleasurable suffusion of altruism seemed to 
envelop her body as she thought that perhaps she 
had at last found something that she could really 
do. She could take this country girl, whose aspira¬ 
tions for a wider life had hitherto been suppressed, 
and help her to do what she wanted to do in the 
world. A spectacular transformation before the 
eyes of the boarding-house girls floated before her 
eyes. They would see what they might have be¬ 
come, she fatuously and rather revengefully thought, 
if they had taken advantage of their contact with 
Dagmar Hallowell. “I have been to school and I 
do know a lot of things—silly things, of course,” 
her sense of form made her append rather insin¬ 
cerely “—and if I can help this girl, and maybe 


CAFETERIA ROMANCE 


163 


other girls—” for her imagination had leaped be¬ 
yond Marthena Plunkitt and she was already staring 
down into a valley of grateful girlish faces, made 
lovely and appealing by the Dagmar touch. 

A picture of Marthena came to her in a sleepy 
vision—a tired, pale-looking little girl, small-featured 
and inclined to be somewhat drab. A little rouge, a 
new way of doing the hair, a few hints on conduct 
from Dagmar, and lo ! Marthena, charming, gracious, 
and beautiful, would exist where there had been just 
a colorless nonentity. 


CHAPTER FOUR 


RELIANCE 

“Wheaton, Aurora, Jamaica, London, I suppose 
Martin knows them all by heart, ” thought Dagmar 
as she looked out on the platform of a little station 
that was like ten other little stations where the 
wheezing old train had already stopped. Martin’s 
supply of anecdotes about these towns was unlim¬ 
ited, and he did not stint himself in his relation of 
them. Not once did he stop to praise Dagmar’s 
personal charms, and she, quite naturally, was get¬ 
ting a little tired of it. Now and then some person 
who had achieved a moderate fame would figure in 
the stories, and then Martin’s voice reflected a fit¬ 
ting deference to greatness. 

“Reliance is the third station after this,’’ Martin 
finally announced joyously. And when the train 
had once more rumbled to a stop, he did not neglect 
to say with unabated zest, “Reliance is the second 
stop after this, ” until finally, after half an hour more 
of seemingly purposeless meandering through the 
fields of Illinois, Martin and Dagmar at last success¬ 
fully descended to the wooden platform of the rail¬ 
way station of the town itself. 

164 


RELIANCE 


165 

A surly-looking lad in overalls was doing some¬ 
thing to some assorted baggage that was being taken 
off the train. He took no notice of Martin, until he 
was hailed with: ‘‘Howdy, Steve ! Good him ting !” 
He turned, and with a swift, shamed glance at Dag- 
mar gave a bashful shake of the body at Martin to¬ 
gether with a look of defiant bewilderment. Good 
hunting! 

“That’s old Steve Burlingame, brother of the 
town drunkard,” explained Martin happily. He 
w^as determined that Dagmar should not miss a 
single whimsical village character. Steve slunk 
away, and Martin, who had built up a mildly ficti¬ 
tious character around each one of the twelve hun¬ 
dred inhabitants of the village, explained as many 
of them as they encountered to Dagmar while they 
picked their way over the cinders and came out on 
the principal street, which was narrow and lined 
with flimsy-looking stores. 

It was the moment just before twilight, when the 
whole world seems to glow with a quality of out¬ 
standing pastels, and to Dagmar the village looked 
like a painted village; a stage-setting rather than an 
actual street. The buildings seemed made of card¬ 
board, and the colors of them looked too bright, the 
signs were too easily readable, and for perhaps one 
second Dagmar was swept into Martin’s romantic 


i66 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


conception of it all, for there was a hush just then, 
as if the curtain had just gone up on the world. 

Afterward she said that it was exactly like a hun¬ 
dred other towns through which she had motored 
in Minnesota and Wisconsin, for her impression 
speedily faded as the evening quickly darkened and 
they hurried up the streets accompanied by Mar¬ 
tin’s interminable comments. “Guess I’d better 
stop at the butcher’s and get some meat for dinner, 
as mother may not have enough for company,” 
said Martin. 

“Isn’t she expecting me?” asked the startled 
Dagmar as they turned in at a lighted shop, where 
two women eyed Dagmar and were introduced to 
her, as was the butcher. They smiled and mur¬ 
mured, “pleased to meet you,” and the butcher 
leered in a sympathetic manner, unmistakably as if 
he thought that Dagmar and Martin were going to 
be married. 

There were ten more introductions before they 
reached what Martin called “The Store”—a dilap¬ 
idated building almost on the edge of town, owned 
by Martin’s father, where an incredible number of 
useless household articles were displayed beside a 
counter containing indigestible candies. It had 
been for forty years what was called a general store, 
and the elder Plunkitt, a half-witted old man now, 


RELIANCE 


167 


wandered pathetically about it, with his old shoul¬ 
ders stooping drearily, mumbling interminably to 
himself. An Irishman, discouraged by four decades 
of an ambitious German wife, the elder Plunkitt had 
gone almost completely out of his mind and clung 
to the store, which was hopelessly out of date in 
enterprising Reliance, as the only thing he loved. 
He would wander about the rooms above it where 
the family had precariously lived before the success 
of Martin had brought to them a comparative pros¬ 
perity, talking to himself amid the rat-infested cor¬ 
ridors, where the falling plaster made such expedi¬ 
tions increasingly dangerous, thinking, heaven knows 
what thoughts and avoided as much as possible by 
his rapidly developing family. 

About the figure of his father, Martin did not 
attempt to throw any romantic veil, though five 
years later the village newspaper reported the dra¬ 
matic incident of the arrival of Martin Plunkitt at 
his father’s funeral just as the body was being low¬ 
ered into the grave, when he flung a single rose down 
on to the casket and was led away weeping. But 
that day his imagination seemed to fail him as he 
looked at his father, and no whimsical characteriza¬ 
tion of the old man fell from his lips. 

Martin’s brother Ed came into the store while 
Dagmar and Martin were there. He seemed not at 


i68 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


all surprised to see his brother, although he had evi¬ 
dently not expected him. “Hello, Martin,” was all 
he said; and “pleased to meet cha, ” to Dagmar, 
with an absence of the knowing look that the rest 
of the villagers had cast at Dagmar. It was plain 
that he, at least, did not expect Dagmar to marry 
Martin. 

Ed was the chief of police of Reliance, and he 
offered to show Dagmar the jail the next day. “I’m 
going to take her to Big Thunder Cliff, ” said Martin 
eagerly. 

“What! Oh, you mean Haynie’s cow pasture? 
Yeah. Martin’s named all the places different 
names, ” he remarked apologetically to Dagmar. 
“Indian names, and it’s kinda hard to keep track of 
them. . . . But, say, for its size, this town’s got the 
classiest jail. No one in it, though !” 

“Don’t you ever have any one in it ? ” 

“Very seldom. I got the keys to it, and me and 
some fellows I know goes down and has a game of 
poker and a drink there once in a while. Oh, yup, 
we did lock up a guy there last month, but only 
overnight. He was drunk while speeding, and going 
through town. ...” 

The air was full of the fine gray powder that seems 
to envelop the world in that moment before it is 
completely dark, and they were crossing a rustic 


RELIANCE 


169 


bridge over Snake Creek—“Wild Tulip Brook,” as 
Martin called it. In the remnant of light, the 
bridge was a graceful entrance to a leafy tunnel, 
imagined romantic, like a drawbridge to a palace 
of Greenwood. 

And there, on the bridge, they met Marthena. 

Her laugh rippled out into the night, and through 
the sentence, “Hello, Martin. Oh, I’m glad to meet 
you. Martin has talked so much about you.” 
And rippled on without dying away. 

“Yes, your brother has told me of you, too,” 
replied Dagmar with a certain smugness. 

The laugh came again. “Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho,” it 
descended the scale on a breath and began again to 
transude the words “I’m sure I can’t imagine what 
he can have told you!” 

In the dim light Dagmar could make out an over¬ 
developed figure of the type which might have been 
used to caricature the mode in women’s figures of 
about 1890—a shady hat which she suspected of 
being made of black lace, worn with a certain air of 
being in the fashion. 

They walked along together chatting common¬ 
places, Dagmar with her sweetest, most appealing 
manner, and Marthena Plunkitt, gaily, with the 
ease of one enjoying herself thoroughly. 

They reached the house, a white house on a cor- 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


170 

ner, of which it somehow came to Dagmar that 
they were all very proud. She knew from the way 
they mentioned the lilac bush that they were elated 
by the possession of a house with a lilac bush on it, 
and that the old porch, when they had stepped up 
the two steps that raised it above the ground, was a 
porch of which all three were mysteriously and hap¬ 
pily conscious of savoring the joy of ownership. 

How could Dagmar know that the Plunkitt fam¬ 
ily, after fifteen years in the stuffy atmosphere of a 
flat above the old store, playing, even in that small 
village, on the sidewalks as children, were, for the 
first time, united as a family with a home of their 
own? The door opened and she saw a cheap oak 
piano. How could she know how proud Marthena 
w T as to have this girl from the city come and see 
that they, like every one else, had a piano, had a 
dining-room which they ate in, an up-stairs, a room 
for Marthena alone? Dagmar could never know 
these things. But she could dimly sense something 
of the thrill that pervaded the air; even if she could 
not understand it. 

And now, in the light, Dagmar saw Marthena for 
the first time. She gave an impression of native 
merriness held down by a ponderous sense of her 
own inferiority—a gaiety that was not able to loose 
itself from Marthena and flow to its natural out- 


RELIANCE 


171 

let, which took its revenge upon her by making a 
natural joyousness appear to be silliness. “ She has 
a nice skin,” thought Dagmar, “ but she’s too fat! ” 
Her healthy voluptuousness had no fashionable ap¬ 
peal, but in an age with less perverted standards of 
feminine beauty, Marthena might have won many 
points from Dagmar. But never could she have 
triumphed over Dagmar if she had been one hun¬ 
dred times as beautiful, for Dagmar was mentally 
a beauty, with the belief in her own attractiveness 
interpenetrated through every grain of her, while 
Marthena was one of those people who should have 
repeated a slogan each morning to reassure herself. 

Mrs. Plunkitt, intermittently called “Maw,” 
“Mama,” and “Mother,” was a little, busy, loving 
person who slipped into her background, became 
part of the background, and yet was somehow the 
hub around which they all revolved; still important, 
though Paw, Papa, Father, lost in his own inepti¬ 
tudes, was nothing any more to his family. He sat 
at dinner staring into the midst of the chatting that 
poured on and on around him, and when the meal 
was over retired, without a word, to his bedroom. 

They adjourned to the front room, and Dagmar 
was asked to play the piano. She played a little, as 
she had been brought up in the tradition that every 
girl child is musical and had later used her knowl- 


172 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


edge against her family by adding a choppy synco¬ 
pation to her technic and playing constantly all the 
current jazz. 

Martin leaned over the piano, his solid heaviness 
not quite as effective as it might have been in that 
position if he had been long and willowy. He whis¬ 
pered to Dagmar: 

“Can you play chords ?” 

“What?” 

“Chords,” repeated Martin mysteriously. “You 
know I hum tunes and you accompany me. “He 
laughed his sudden engaging boyish laugh and said 
through it: “I’ve written some tunes !” 

At that moment Dagmar liked him thoroughly, for 
he seemed in some miraculous way to detach himself 
from his lumbering seriousness. When he found 
that Dagmar could not only accompany him but 
could play the songs he had written on the piano, he 
was overjoyed. 

“Those were heart-beats set to music only played on 
golden strings,” 

sang Martin. 

“Did you write the words, too ?” asked Dagmar. 
He nodded, and continued: 

“ That seemed to whisper sweet and soft, and memories 
comfort brings. 


RELIANCE 


i 73 

I seem to see my dear old father, and my heart breaks 
as he sings. 

Those heart-beats set to music that were meant for 
golden strings.” 

He reddened when he had finished but seemed 
proud of them. “I hope to sell them some day and 
maybe just write songs for a living.” 

‘‘There’s lots of money in songs,” said Marthena. 

“Here’s another.” He hummed the tune through 
for Dagmar and she played while he sang: 

It’s a long, long road to heart’s desire; 

But that blue-eved girl of mine 
Has eyes aglow with love’s own fire, 

Harbors of love divine— 

And her look would melt a rolling stone. 

No angel could be higher, 

And she’s waiting there for me alone 
On the road to heart’s desire. 

The melodies were as hackneyed as the words, and 
Dagmar caught them easily. She liked them because 
they were like all the rest of the popular songs of the 
more sentimental sort, and put Martin into ecstasies 
by saying so. 

She played old things that the Plunkitts knew, and 
they all sang. Marthena, who was taking music- 
lessons, could not yet play. They hovered over her, 
they surrounded her with admiration, and Dagmar 


174 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


responded to it all with a liking that was faintly con¬ 
temptuous. 

At ten o’clock Mrs. Plunkitt summoned them to 
the dining-room where cake and ice-cream lay upon 
the table. It was like a party, and as they were all 
in high, gay spirits, it was a party. And then Martin 
ceremoniously took Dagmar on his midnight walk to 
Big Thunder Cliff. 

The February air was damply invigorating. They 
walked along swiftly down a country road blacker 
than any that Dagmar had ever seen. ‘‘Turn here, 
said Martin, and in the enveloping darkness she was 
unable to make out which way he had gone. He 
seized her arm, and they turned into a way where the 
footing was very precarious. “To our right is the 
haunted house,” he whispered, and Dagmar shiv¬ 
ered, though she ought to have known that the house 
would not be even traditionally haunted. They 
were, as Martin’s brother Ed could have told them, 
making their way through the cow pasture of an 
eminent citizen named Haynie; but in the darkness, 
Dagmar did not know what perilous and exciting 
way they might be treading. She knew that they 
were going up, for her body felt the strain of the 
climb, but she was not prepared to have Martin say, 
with an accompanying jerk to her arm: “You nearly 
fell, that time, into Big Thunder Gully. ” In a hushed 


RELIANCE 


i7S 


voice he told her to lie down on her stomach and look 
over the edge of Big Thunder Cliff. From an as¬ 
sortment of grunts, it was evident that Martin was 
doing it. She lay down obediently, but could see 
nothing, and was obsessed by a nervous feeling that 
she might edge over into Big Thunder Gully if she 
moved. She lay, straining her eyes into the dark¬ 
ness, shivering from cold, and unable to feel the awe 
of nature and her own smallness, which Martin was 
talkatively experiencing. 

“I want to tell you a dream of mine, ,, said Martin. 
“Something Eve never told you before.” 

Dagmar sneezed. 

“It’s about the Pirate’s cave,” said Martin, “and 


He paused for encouragement from Dagmar, but 
she interrupted: “Martin, I’m dreadfully cold, and 
I’m scared stiff I’m going to fall and break my neck. 
Let’s go back.” 

He was slightly aggrieved. “Well, come on.” 

“Heavens, I can’t come, I’m afraid I’ll fall! ” He 
reached for her and pulled her upward toward him. 
For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, 
but he didn’t. They trod the path downward in 
silence until they came to the road. 

“Here’s the haunted house,” said Martin cheer¬ 
fully, and they were soon home. 



CHAPTER FIVE 


THE PIRATE’S DEN 

The room in which Dagmar awoke the next morn¬ 
ing was pleasant with cool February sunshine, and 
cosily old-fashioned under its low, slanting ceiling. 
The blue-and-white curtains at the windows matched 
the bed covering and the scarfs on the table and 
marble-topped dresser. And a curtain of the same 
material had been made on some industrious person’s 
sewing-machine to hang over the box-like wardrobe 
that stood in one corner. It was a girl’s room, un¬ 
mistakably, and a rather sentimental girl she was, to 
judge by the number of colored prints that hung on 
the wall of young ladies dressed in the fashion of 
about 1908 undergoing various preliminaries to mat¬ 
rimony. She had gone to sleep beside Marthena in a 
double bed to the sound of the suppressed but eager 
tones of Marthena engaged in the relation of various 
anecdotes totally without interest to Dagmar. As 
she opened her sleepy eyes she could hear Marthena 
singing down-stairs in a high uneven soprano which 
probably made her throat very sore. 

Marthena had confided the night before that she 
was anxious to learn what she called social culture. 

176 


THE PIRATE’S DEN 


177 


“I know lots of things already,” she had said naively * 
‘dike not sticking your little finger out when you’re 
drinking a cup of coffee. I suppose you know all 
those things ?” 

“I don’t know,” Dagmar had muttered, smiling to 
herself in the darkness. And yet, in spite of a some¬ 
what helpless amusement, she sympathized with 
Marthena and hoped to be able to help her. ‘ ‘ Though 
just what I can do, I don’t know,” thought Dag¬ 
mar, “her clothing is too fancy, of course”; but she 
did not feel inclined to tell Marthena this. In spite 
of her glib questions there was nothing really con¬ 
fiding about Marthena, and there was a hint in her 
manner that she might not take kindly to the crit¬ 
icism that she asked for. “I wonder what they ex¬ 
pect me to do ?” she thought, for the vision of Dag¬ 
mar, the charm expert, was already fading. Though 
as yet Dagmar had seen no actual sign of the spirit 
of wistfulness which Martin had described his sister 
as possessing, the idea of it still held Dagmar’s inter¬ 
est. Ordinarily, she would have said, “A fat girl 
who giggles,” and dismissed Marthena from her 
mind, but Martin’s account of her had made her 
think of Marthena’s unpleasing exterior as a tightly 
sealed vessel for a really beautiful character. 

While she was dressing, Marthena came into the 
room, giggling, and sat on the bed to watch her. 


1 7 S 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


She commented on the contents of Dagmar’s trav¬ 
elling bag, and it was evident that Dagmar’s un¬ 
derwear roused an admiration amounting almost to a 
religious awe. 

“Would you advise me to have my eyebrows 
pulled?” she asked anxiously. “Some people say 
I’d look better, but mother thinks I ought not to do 
it.” She looked dishevelled and disagreeably untidy, 
perched there on the edge of the bed, though an 
impartial judge would have been compelled to award 
her a much higher mark in both neatness and tidi¬ 
ness than he could have given Dagmar. But the 
pictorial quality of Dagmar’s disorder was never 
irritating to the eye. And just as paradoxically, 
Marthena, though actually a few months younger 
than Dagmar, seemed older on account of an appear¬ 
ance of indeterminate youth. For Dagmar’s greatest 
charm was her definite youngness. 

Marthena was without that power of loosing the 
sympathetic currents of friendship and love which 
Dagmar possessed in such abundance. Dagmar was 
to learn that at moments Marthena became con¬ 
scious of this, and tried, by beating her fists 
against the implacable and freezing vacuum, 
which seemed to surround her, to break her way 
through into the ranks of beautiful and charming 
women. And later it was only in these periods of 


THE PIRATE’S DEN 


179 


wretched realization that Dagmar remembered at 
all the wistful girl that Martin had described. For 
on most occasions Marthena regarded herself with 
an optimism that was to Dagmar’s superficial obser¬ 
vation a boundless conceit. 

After her noon breakfast, Dagmar went with Mar¬ 
tin to the house of some people who sold cream to 
buy some for dinner. 

He went to the front door, removed his hat, stood 
with a certain gallantry on the door-step. “I’m 
Martin Plunkitt,” he began. The angular woman 
in the doorway looked down at the bottle in his hand. 
“The cream’s round in back at the bam,” she re¬ 
marked and closed the door. 

Martin was undaunted. He went joyously around 
and told the man in the bam that he was Martin 
Plunkitt. No casual, whimsical countryside conver¬ 
sation developed. None developed while Dagmar 
was in Reliance, though Martin told her that he 
was in the habit of having many of them. 

“Ah, here comes my Helen of Troy,” exclaimed 
Martin as a slant-eyed girl with shining black hair 
coiled smoothly on the back of her neck came de¬ 
murely along the narrow brick walk toward them 
with a shy self-possession. There was an illusive, 
Oriental prettiness about her, as if she would have 
passed well in the movies for a Japanese girl. “Miss 


i8o 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Orsi,” pronounced Martin with his most solemn in¬ 
troductory manner, “meet Miss Hallowell.” 

“Miss Hallowell,” repeated the girl with a myste¬ 
rious upward look of amusement that roused Dag- 
mar’s momentary interest, though she afterward 
learned that the mystery was as bogus as the Oriental 
look about her, for she was the daughter of a wealthy 
Greek who owned a cigar store in Reliance, and was 
striving as intensely as the Irish Catholics of Reliance 
to be American. 

“That’s Marthena’s best friend, Ida Orsi,” said 
Martin. “A perfect Grecian type. She’s coming to 
Chicago to study dressmaking, this fall, and maybe 
Marthena is coming with her. I don’t know, though. 
She’s not just the girl for Marthena to be with.” 
He lowered his voice. ‘ ‘ She has no soul, ’ ’ he confided. 

Dagmar looked astonished. “I should think it 
would be nice for Marthena to have a friend with 
her,” she said. 

Martin nodded. “That’s just it. But she needs 
a higher type of girl. She needs some one who would 
be a constant inspiration to her like you would. I 
hope you will see a lot of Marthena when she comes 
to the city.” 

“I hope so, too,” said Dagmar politely. “Will 
you have her with you ?” 

They were approaching the house, and Martin 
wrinkled his brows and smiled at her: the most 


THE PIRATE’S DEN 


181 


whimsical combination of expressions he knew. 
“I’ll take this cream in the house, and then would 
you like to walk?” he said. And, without waiting 
for her to answer, ran around the house to the back 
door and joined her again almost immediately. 

“Your question,” said Martin as they walked 
over the muddy country road, for they were going 
to go and look at Big Thunder Cliff in the daytime, 
“is rather curious, because it bears on something I 
was thinking of talking to you about. ” He drew a 
long breath and looked around in search of more 
imposing material for his introductory remarks. 
“Last night, ” he said, “I told you that I wanted to 
tell you about the Pirate’s Den. And the Pirate’s Den 
is one of the dreams dearest to my heart of hearts! 

“High up under the eaves of a tall gray sky¬ 
scraper in New York there are a few simple attic 
rooms filled with the treasures of many voyages. 
These rooms are gay with the light voices of many 
happy people, and the atmosphere there is that of 
Bohemia unalloyed—do you get the picture?” que¬ 
ried Martin anxiously. “For it is a description of 
the Pirate’s Den!” 

They were approaching a wide plateau overhang¬ 
ing a ten-foot drop onto a soft clay floor. In the 
distance, the trees, faintly gray against the February 
sky, outlined the tops of the hills. Many of them 
were bleak and lifeless as telephone-poles, but others 


182 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


had a certain gaunt vitality that seemed to feel the 
implicit spring. 

“This,” Martin interrupted himself to say before 
Dagmar could answer his question, “is Big Thunder 
Cliff.” Dagmar looked over the drop which no 
child would have hesitated to have made, and felt 
somewhat ashamed of her fright the night before. 
She shivered a little with a breeze that unexpectedly 
seemed to rise from across the sloping plain behind 
her, and lost track of Martin’s remarks for a mo¬ 
ment or two. “. . . hitherto the Pirate’s Den has 
always existed in just one place for me. And that 
place is New York. But lately I’ve come to think 
that perhaps it could be in Chicago with you and 
with Marthena.” 

“What do you mean,” said Dagmar. “Where 
in Chicago ?” 

“Yonder is the hill I have told you about,” an¬ 
swered Martin, pointing off to the north. “Fla¬ 
mingo Hill, I have named it, because in the fall, the 
most glorious color outlines it, just like the feathers 
of that brilliant bird, the flamingo. Yes’m” said 
Martin, “in Chicago. Surely a bright spirit like 
you would be happier in such a place as the Pirate’s 
Den than in the dreary unhomelike confines of the 
boarding-house where you now live. Am I correct 
in supposing this ?” 


THE PIRATE’S DEN 


183 

“Ye-es, ” admitted Dagmar slowly, though she 
had no idea what Martin meant and had a vague 
notion that he was proposing to her. 

“Yes,” said Martin decisively. “Then that’s 
settled. Two girls I know, two very artistic young 
school-teachers have a very doggy apartment within 
walking distance of the loop. I have been to call 
upon them a few times and have been favorably 
impressed. Of course it now has nothing of the 
charm which we will give it, but with books and 
flowers and perhaps some odd, strange vases, it will 
be very like the Pirate’s Den of my dreams. ” 

“You mean Marthena and I would take this 
apartment together?” asked Dagmar. 

“Yes, with a room for me entirely separate from 
it and opening off the main hall. What congenial 
souls we would gather together in our cosy living- 
room, ” said Martin enthusiastically. “Will you go 
and look at it some night soon ?” 

“I might look at it,” said Dagmar doubtfully, 
but Martin’s heartfelt and theatrically schoolboyish 
“Hurray” left her vaguely uneasy. She had not 
agreed to anything definite. She did not realize 
that once she even tentatively agreed to an arrange¬ 
ment of that sort it would be embarrassing to with¬ 
draw from it. 

Marthena was sheepishly hilarious at the idea of 


184 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


coming to Chicago and living with Dagmar. In 
the glow of Marthena’s admiration and astonished 
pleasure in Dagmar’s perfections, Dagmar’s mis¬ 
givings about the desirability of seeing Marthena 
constantly were driven deep into her and overlaid 
with the excitements of change, a possibility of a 
relief from the boarding-house, and the curiosity 
she felt toward any untried venture. She was 
young and had none of the sceptical distrust of such 
a relation nor any knowledge of the difficulty she 
might find in extricating herself from it that a more 
experienced girl might have had. The care-free 
American attitude which is so often and so well 
expressed in the phrase, ‘ 4 I’ll try anything once,” 
swayed Dagmar in this as it did many other times 
in her life when she was called upon to make a de¬ 
cision. 

She parted from Marthena with many expressions 
of felicity on both sides, and though she did not 
realize it, it was already settled that the two girls 
would live together: the ball of circumstance had 
been sent rolling down the hill, and Dagmar could 
have withdrawn from the agreement only with a 
great deal of unpleasant explanation which would 
have called upon her for the self-exertion which she 
abhorred. 


CHAPTER SIX 


NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 

“The Pirate’s Den,” thought Dagmar when she 
had returned to the city and was once more riding 
around on the street-cars in search of shadowy gram¬ 
mar-schools. “What an absurd idea! And I sup¬ 
pose it would be some perfectly awful place which 
Martin would gild with phrases and I would look 
at it and try to pretend it was romantic.” She 
sighed, for she was really very lonesome and the 
thought of even Martin and Marthena was better 
than the unlimited supply of her own society in 
which she was once more being submerged. “I’m 
an amusing person,” she thought, “but too much of 
me bores even myself.” Her dreams of Pal were, 
except at intervals, becoming a trifle pale and shop¬ 
worn from lack of new inspiration. Even the one 
in which she greeted him ecstatically and welcomed 
him home had been rung through so many varia¬ 
tions that dreaming it was like rereading a children’s 
story once thrilling, in which all the fearful bugaboos 
are slightly ridiculous, and the amusing little funny 
men are seen to be only gabbling away at puns long 

since exhausted. The sparkle was temporarily gone 

185 


i86 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


from this dream consolation that had for weeks 
given her an unrecognized happiness, and she went 
as miserably through the day after she had returned 
from Reliance as if she had been let back into a 
relentless grind after a gay week-end with delight¬ 
ful people. Instead of which, as she reassured her¬ 
self dismally, she had come back to her beloved 
work for which she had given up everything. 

“It is silly of me,” she thought, when she was 
having a lonely dinner by herself in a restaurant. 
“Why in the world don’t I go home? Any other 
girl with just common sense would have gone back 
ages ago.” The insipid seeming faces of a dozen 
boys rose in her mind at the thought of St. Paul 
and the young vital Pal image erased them at once. 
“But he’s not here,” thought Dagmar dismally, “and 
I can’t follow him across the country to New York. 
What in the world is the matter with me that I do 
such queer things?” The indefiniteness of her own 
actions puzzled her when she tried to be introspec¬ 
tive, for she liked to think of herself as doing clear- 
cut, logical things, with easily traceable reasons like 
a heroine of fiction. Dagmar shared the intellec¬ 
tual craving of so many philosophers, insipient and 
otherwise, of discovering a unity in the shape of a 
large enveloping reason that would serve as a main¬ 
spring for every deed. 


NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 187 

She would have liked to say: 4 ‘ I am the modem 
young woman who desires a career. For that I 
stay in Chicago, cut off from my friends, and for 
that I give up every pleasure.” She would have 
liked to get up in the morning thinking: “ I am the 
modem young woman, bounding out of bed to meet 
my important career.” She would have liked to 
draw on her stockings ecstatically, thinking: “ I am 
the modem young woman,” to have brushed her 
hair to the rhythmic thought that she was vitally 
of her generation. But such pleasures pall, the 
dramatic pitch would not maintain itself, and she 
knew, to her dismay, that she was not interested in 
the school children of Chicago, except at those in¬ 
creasingly infrequent times when she was swayed 
by the mob spirit as expertly sprayed through the 
office by Mrs. Jones. 

She would not have been the modem young 
woman at all if it had not occurred to her that per¬ 
haps she was sexually starved. “My true function 
is to bear children,” would be her echo on these 
occasions. A muddled pride kept her from saying, 
“I am in love with one who is sure to return to this 
place and, therefore, I keep with him a sort of secret 
tryst.” 

The anaemic gaiety and pallid bustling of the 
restaurant around her seemed to be unreal as the 


i88 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


happenings on some far-off and colorless stage. If 
I were at home now, dining in public, I couldn’t 
help seeing Bill Hessler or Jim Sweet, or somebody 
no matter where I went, and when I came out on 
the street I’d know—well—she hesitated as the 
fluctuating crowds of people in St. Paul whom she 
incredibly did not know floated across her mind— 
well, I’d know the doorman, anyway. Sentimental 
tears stood in her eyes as she pityingly thought of 
the gay Dagmar Hallowell being glad of even a 
doorman’s welcome. “To-morrow I’ll go home,” 
said Dagmar vigorously. “I’m not going to stay 
around this town being lonesome when I don’t have 
to.” 

Vaguely ashamed of her resolution, she paid her 
check and left the restaurant. “Yes, to-morrow 
I’ll go home,” she said as she doggedly tramped 
along Clark Street, wandering north in the indefinite 
belief that she was walking toward the boarding¬ 
house. “If just one person would speak to me 
and smile and say, How do you do, Dagmar, it 
wouldn’t be so bad,” thought Dagmar looking 
eagerly into the faces of the thugs and prostitutes 
who make up the aristocracy of the district through 
which she was passing. Unnecessary lights had 
just come out as if to ornament the blue translucent 
sky. All around the dirt and squalor had a painted 


NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 189 

picturesque aspect, as if it had been overlaid with 
shellac and would not soil a pair of immaculate 
gloves. “Yes, I’m beaten,” thought Dagmar, hang¬ 
ing her head as a fitting posture, and dragging her 
feet over the pavement. “To-morrow I’m going 
home.” 

But all this was not to be lost for want of an audi¬ 
ence. “How do you do, Dagmar,” said some one, 
and she looked up to find that Martin Plunkitt had 
overtaken her. “Just the time of evening,” he 
said, “for you to come and see the Pirate’s Den!” 

Suddenly her melancholy left her. There were 
a million things to talk about with Martin. Coming 
in on the train they had both been too sleepy to 
talk much, and now there were all the impressions 
of her trip to tell him, all the events of her day. She 
walked beside him buoyantly, chattering gaily. 

They left Clark Street and walked to the newer 
part of the town. The widened Michigan Avenue 
stretched before them with a broad, noble gesture, 
to the pale pointing finger of the Wrigley building 
outlined with lights, and looking in some intangible 
way at the same time majestic and irritating. 

The broad, stone bridge gave them a vista of the 
dull-green marble river opening out generously to 
the endless blueness of Michigan. A lighted lake 
boat steaming importantly up the river lent an air 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


190 

of bustle to the scene, and the people walking to 
and fro seemed to Dagmar to be like the citizens 
of some forgotten city of antiquity, moving among 
their strange magnificent buildings, unaware of 
their picturesque doom of oblivion. For at such 
moments as Dagmar was experiencing, all civiliza¬ 
tions seem transient moments, phases in the dream 
of some God about to awaken. 

They walked on. By this time Dagmar had grown 
silent, and Martin talked on unheeded by her. By 
the time they reached their destination, her feet 
were tired and she was again discouraged and dis¬ 
consolate, but the sight of the building revived her. 

A large, gray building of four stories, the entrance 
was through a narrow gateway of wrought iron, 
which led into an open stone-paved court. “In 
summer,” whispered Martin, “the cool green shadows 
are fringed with ferns, and a fountain murmurs 
where you see that dancing-girl.” 

Dagmar looked down at the irregular design of 
the floor and thoughts of Italy and France flitted 
lazily through her mind. “It’s Old World,” she 
said excitedly. 

“Old World, that’s it,” said Martin. “You’ve hit 
it exactly. I knew you’d like it.” 

“And the railings are like etchings,” said Dagmar. 
Upward for four stories, balconies embraced the 


NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 191 


walls and thin iron railings like pencil-marks against 
the white stone kept la Boheme from falling off 
the very narrow platforms, and breaking into little 
bits against the hard floor of the court. 

They made their way upward to the studio apart¬ 
ments, Dagmar and Martin both re-echoing each 
other’s joyful excitement. Inside were two large 
light rooms—“I have furniture for them,” said 
Martin. In one, the larger one, Marthena and Dag¬ 
mar were to sleep and the other was to be Martin’s 
studio. “In time, perhaps, I can get a grand piano,” 
said Martin. For a composer of music undoubtedly 
needs one, if only for scenery. 

A burst of enthusiastic new life came to Dagmar. 
Here was a setting. Here was the place to have 
Pal find her when he returned from New York. And 
here was what she had come to Chicago to find. 
As a very young girl is sometimes hypnotized into 
marriage by the thought of magnificent new clothes 
and the period of parties and events in which she 
is to be the protagonist, Dagmar was dazzled by 
the idea of living in this new place so much that 
she overlooked the thought that she would perhaps 
not like her companions. “We could hang long 
thick curtains at the windows of a dull, queer blue,” 
she said excitedly, and Martin broke in as eagerly: 
“ Or I thought of having black curtains coming down 


192 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


straight on each side and lying in a heap on the 
floor like a drawing in the Yellow Book.” 

“Oh, and a couch,” said Dagmar; “we could 
have a long, low couch made to fit in under that 
window, and I’ve always been perfectly crazy to 
live in a house like this. Margaret has two old high 
chairs up in the attic that she’s not using, and I’ve 
always been crazy to have some place to put them, 
and they’d go in here, and Margaret could send us 
just lots of things-” 

They signed a lease the next morning, and a week 
later Marthena came down from Reliance and got 
a job in a mail-order house at fifteen dollars a week. 
Martin Plunkitt and John Patlock paid the rent, 
Margaret shipped down furniture out of the attic 
from the house on Summit Avenue, and so they 
were not obliged to use Martin’s things, which, while 
they had the advantage of being odd, strange things, 
would perhaps have been neither if they had been 
less dilapidated. 

Marthena was eagerly looking forward to her first 
pay-day when she could buy herself some clothes. 
She dreamed of them at night, those clothes that 
were to make her graceful, beautiful, attractive as 
Dagmar. She had come to Chicago in a new cos¬ 
tume, painfully put together from old clothes in im¬ 
itation of the plain smartness of Dagmar’s tailored 



NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 193 


suit. One glance at Dagmar had assured her that 
her own wardrobe was full of things that were all too 
cheaply fancy. Her cheap felt hat, stiff and awk¬ 
ward, was to her like the soft graceful fall of the 
thirty-dollar felt Dagmar had worn. Only when she 
saw Dagmar again did she realize how futile her ef¬ 
forts had been. 

At the end of their first day in the new lodging 
Dagmar had arrived in a cab. “The street-cars 
are simply hectic at this time of night,” she said. 

“Riding on them simply incapacitated me-” 

Marthena stared at her. “Aren’t you funny?” 
she said. “Don’t you ever ride on the street-car ?” 

Dagmar was irritated. If she was going to con¬ 
descend to live with Marthena, Marthena would 
have to keep in her proper place. “Of course I do, ” 
she snapped. “But I think it’s outrageous to have 
to push your way through a mob. ” 

Marthena’s laugh held a faintly patronizing 
tinkle. “I never heard of such a thing. The cars 
are always crowded in the city. 

Martin entered smilingly. “My thoughts of you 
all day have been like the sun dancing on far-trav¬ 
elled waters in June, ” he greeted her pleasantly. 

“Martin always talks kind of crazy,” said Mar¬ 
thena uneasily. “Say, Dagmar, are you going to 
keep your hat on for dinner ? ” 



194 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


They were going to dine in a Greek restaurant 
near by, which Martin had recommended. Dagmar 
answered Marthena: “Why, yes, Marthena. ” 

“Is that the thing to do?” asked Marthena. 
“Would it be wrong if I took mine off ? Why don’t 
you take yours off ? ” 

“I prefer to keep it on,” said Dagmar, whose tired 
nerves were becoming more and more irritated by 
Marthena’s chatter, which was as incessant as a 
monkey’s and through which ran a meaningless 
little laugh. 

“But wouldn’t you ever take it off?” persisted 
Marthena. 

“I would if I wanted to,” said Dagmar. “I al¬ 
ways do what I want to do. ” 

Marthena pondered. “But would it be good 
manners ?” she asked. 

Dagmar, though her conscience reproached her 
dimly for going back on her tacit agreement to teach 
Marthena just such things, was too infuriated by 
Marthena’s insistence on the point to give her the 
simple answer she desired. 

“It’s impossible to attempt to be smart in a Greek 
restaurant,” was her elliptical rejoinder, as she fol¬ 
lowed Martin who was already on his long journey 
down the stairs. 

Marthena looked in the glass at herself and thought 


NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 195 


deeply on Dagmar’s words. She gathered that it 
would be perfectly correct for her to enter the restau¬ 
rant without a hat. But then why hadn’t Dagmar 
done it ? A matter of choice perhaps. Anyway, 
Marthena didn’t want Dagmar to think that she 
would copy her in everything. She decided not to 
wear the hat. 

In the restaurant sat a fat middle-aged Jewess. 
At another table a woman who looked like a fifth- 
rate actress out of a job sat eating soup. Both of 
these women were hatted. Marthena was furious. 

‘‘ It is the correct thing to wear a hat in a restaurant 
like this, and you never told me. You just wanted 
me to look foolish,” she flung at Dagmar. 

“But, my dear girl, haven’t you ever eaten in a 
restaurant before ?” asked the astonished Dagmar. 

“No, not much except last night and once or twice 
before with Martin, and I never noticed. Besides I 
wanted to do the correct thing.” 

“It doesn’t matter a bit,” said Dagmar, a little 
touched as she saw how much it mattered to Mar¬ 
thena. “I’ll take my hat off.” 

She removed her hat and Marthena relapsed into 
a state of adoration again. Dagmar’s hair was the 
prettiest she had ever seen, and Dagmar generously 
explained about the henna. “And do you use rouge 
too ? I thought nice girls never used rouge.” 


196 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Dagmar was mollified and they spent a happy 
evening alone together. In her loneliness and her 
sudden new appreciation of what it would mean to 
be what she called an utterly commonplace person, 
Dagmar once more resumed her conception of her¬ 
self as an inspiring example. She was too flighty 
and temperamentally nervous to remain always calm 
and superior in the face of criticism from a girl her 
own age, but she did under Marthena’s streaks of 
obvious adoration become didactic in a faintly af¬ 
fectionate way. 

But on the whole the experiment of putting the 
two girls together was, from the first, not a success. 
Dagmar who was accustomed to being amused by 
people who were concerned over problems of etiquette 
could not overcome a feeling of irritation to find her¬ 
self actually living with such a person. And Mar- 
thena developed an intermittent hatred of Dagmar 
—not, as Dagmar thought, through jealousy, but 
through shame; she had poured over Dagmar one 
of the richest things in her nature—a whole-souled 
admiration—amounting, at the time, to worshipping 
love. And Dagmar, instead of being goddess-like 
in her acceptance of it, had underestimated Mar¬ 
thena’s intelligence and had been contemptuous of 
her, showing herself as a mortal and forcing Mar- 
thena to the place of a worm. She could not forgive 



NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 197 

herself for grovelling before Dagmar. She could not 
love Dagmar any more and still respect herself. 

Dagmar had hopes of fixing Marthena up. They 
invaded a beauty parlor and Marthena was given a 
facial massage, her eyebrows were plucked, her hair 
was given what the tactful young woman called a 
wash. Dagmar corseted Marthena and lectured her. 
She gave her absurd pointers on conversation and 
how to carry herself. And Marthena improved. 
She improved—infinitesimally. 

Sometimes they seemed to Dagmar to be two sor¬ 
did, mean, spiteful girls bringing out each other’s 
worst qualities. For Marthena, after Dagmar be¬ 
gan to gather a little group of attentive boys around 
her, made Dagmar think her an outrageous liar 
because of the tales she told, of the men in Reliance 
who had loved her. And there was, also, she told 
the incredulous Dagmar, a boy in Elgin who might 
come down to see her. 

Dagmar represented two things to Marthena. 
First an ideal of herself, an awe-inspiring, breath¬ 
taking wonder—the girl she hoped to become—and 
second, a maze of irritating bewildering qualities 
in just a girl that she had to live with. There was 
no clear thought in Marthena’s feeling. She wor¬ 
shipped Dagmar, the Goddess, the sublimated self- 
image, and believed that a deep love was always a 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


198 

part of any emotion she felt for the actual Dagmar. 
Thus she suffered the pangs of the betrayed friend, 
and the agony of self-pity descended in any quarrel 
between them. Quarrels that left Dagmar cold and 
with the weapon of scornful sarcasm reduced Mar- 
thena to a tearful pulp like that of the wronged and 
helpless wife. 

Living together, perhaps through chance, but at 
least partially through choice, one of them drawn 
there from a motive with its noble aspect, the desire 
of aiding another human being to attain his ambi¬ 
tions, these two girls were fundamentally unable to 
understand each other. 

This girl would not have possessed the outstand¬ 
ing unpleasant characteristics to Dagmar that she 
did possess, possibly, if she had been beautiful. For 
the mask of beauty not only covers minor flaws of 
character, it sometimes absorbs them, melts them 
into nothingness. Those weak places which were 
especially noticeable in the fabric of emotions, and 
strivings that were Marthena’s might have been 
mended with just a little of the magic thread of 
beauty. 

This Martha, striving desperately to be a Mar- 
thena, believed in her own intrinsic worth as an at¬ 
tractive and agreeable person, which was all she 
wanted to be after all. But her ineptitudes thwarted 


NUMBER NINE PEARSON STREET 199 


her. At times she was frenzied by her inability to 
rise above the lump of flesh that appeared to be 
Marthena, and to dominate as she felt the true Mar- 
thena could dominate, through sheer might of charm. 
At other times she was hopeful of marvels; her fea¬ 
tures would change, become more agreeable while 
remaining, somehow, her features. A wonder-work¬ 
ing corset would make her figure less lumpy, a magic 
book of etiquette would tell her what to do to make 
herself liked and adored. At these times the sight 
of Dagmar going her careless way, commanding 
homage as she went, maddened and exasperated 
her. And she would spend hours in bed crying 
while Dagmar tried to comfort her. 

At these times she would sometimes grovel before 
Dagmar. “You’ve always had everything,” she 
would sometimes sob. “ If I were like you, had had 
your chances, I’d be wonderful too.” These bits of 
homage softened Dagmar toward her after the most 
violent upbraidings from Marthena, for she was 
hysterical and emotional, and would go on inex¬ 
haustibly about herself and her desires. Dagmar, 
who, being without that particular grief of Mar¬ 
thena’s, was philosophically able to master it, would 
impatiently and glibly repeat a few platitudes about 
Marthena being the captain of her soul. 

In Marthena’s desire to achieve the precision of 


200 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


correctness she objected to Dagmar’s smoking. The 
best people of Reliance did not smoke. “And you 
say damn,” said Marthena, “and Hell, and those 
are things I’ve been brought up to believe that no 
lady ever says.” 

“I am not,” said Dagmar, “thank heaven, a lady. 
Lady is another word that has gone out. Add that 
to your list of fascinating social blunders !” 

“What do you mean, Dagmar Hallowell, I’m a 
perfectly respectable girl.” 

‘ ‘ Heavens, yes, ’ ’ said Dagmar recklessly. ‘ ‘When 
the trumpet blows and the names on the honor roll 
are being read off, you’ll undoubtedly get middle- 
class mention.” 

Marthena looked alarmed, and puzzled. “What 
does that mean ? I do belong to the middle class. 
That’s nothing to be ashamed of!” She was se¬ 
cretly proud to think Dagmar had not said she be¬ 
longed in the lower classes. Dagmar laughed and 
thought Marthena stupid, not realizing that such 
snobbish distinctions were merely beyond Marthena’s 
present scope. 


CHAPTER SEVEN 


THE BELOVED BOY 

A few days after her arrival in Chicago Mrs. Jones 
had said to Dagmar, “I want you to come out to my 
house to tea very soon and meet, and meet—” she 
paused and looked at Dagmar significantly—“the 
beloved boy!” She laughed in her blithe fashion. 
“I mean my son Alec. I’m perfectly foolish about 
him. He’s in the University here, and he certainly 
does like the girls. He’ll find you quite attractive, 
I’m afraid. Oh, young people, young people! But 
what would we do without them ?” 

But the weeks had gone by, and Mrs. Jones had 
not remembered to make her invitation a definite 
one. Her time was taken up with a great many con¬ 
ferences about her organization, and it was not until 
Dagmar had left the boarding-house and gone to live 
with Marthena that Mrs. Jones invited her to come 
to supper on Sunday evening and to bring along her 
friend with whom she was living. 

Mrs. Jones lived in a house in the suburbs, full of 
square tiny rooms, marble-topped tables, distressed- 
looking plants, and probably the largest collection 


201 


202 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


of useless bric-a-brac in the city. Her large expan¬ 
sive nature successfully dominated her surroundings, 
which seemed to say: “We are a waste, but every¬ 
thing is a waste except the admirable Mrs. Jones.” 

“And this,” said Mrs. Jones, “is the beloved boy !” 

A short broad-shouldered youth, whose handsome 
blond head was noble in size and moulding, emerged 
from the furniture at this command. He blushed 
very much and responded respectfully to the salu¬ 
tation of Marthena, and with unsuccessfully con¬ 
cealed admiration to that of Dagmar. The rich and 
ever-swelling tide of his mother’s conversation poured 
over them, and they seated themselves awkwardly 
in Mrs. Jones’s tiny parlor with great discomfort to 
the piano. 

Alec Jones was the first boy that Dagmar had met 
since her arrival, unless Martin be classified in this 
way. But Martin’s admiration for her was unsatis¬ 
factory, Dagmar had long since felt, because it was 
influenced to the last degree by his policy of educat¬ 
ing himself and his sister. “Alec would be a nice 
boy for Marthena to play around with,” said Dagmar 
to herself, with some dishonesty. “As she won’t be 
able to interest him sufficiently to-day, I’ll just make 
sure of him for her.” 

Alec Jones was still in college, though something 
of power and matured capability in his face sug- 


THE BELOVED BOY 


203 


gested that he might be beyond college age. He 
was, as a matter of fact, twenty-two years old and 
ripe for throwing all of his potentialities into a tre¬ 
mendous love-affair. 

Alec was drawn up and sucked in and lost in the 
vortex of his passion for Dagmar almost as soon as 
he met her. Not only did she embody for him all 
his dreams, but the notion that he was protecting 
her from the evils of a great city fed his desire to 
shield, which the impotency of his shortness and his 
mother’s desire to make a child of him had always 
thwarted. Richly affectionate and with a power of 
unselfishness verging on potentialities of martyr¬ 
dom, Alec Jones’s nature was bottled within his 
exterior by the inelastic bands of an overwhelm¬ 
ing shyness. His mother’s only child, and washed 
from babyhood in her own brand of sentimentality, 
Alec was no more the spoiled child of tradition than 
he was the soul warped by selfishness. The pro¬ 
tecting care which his mother had always exuber¬ 
antly lavished upon him had only made him long as 
exuberantly to squander his own love on another 
person. And Dagmar, beautiful and exquisite, and 
oh !—alone in a wicked city, gathered him in, in her 
careless way, and accepted his heart and soul as so 
many trifling presents. With a long sigh of con¬ 
tent that his unexercised but full-grown faculty of 


204 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


protecting the weak was to be used at last, Alec 
settled down to an existence under Dagmar’s feet. 

The evening passed off, amid Mrs. Jones’s cheer¬ 
ful platitudes and Marthena’s giggles. Alec’s shy¬ 
ness made him devote himself unwontedly and 
dazedly to Marthena, since he hardly dared look at 
his Goddess. But it was of Dagmar, to Mar¬ 
thena’s astonishment, that he asked permission to 
call. 

A few nights later Dagmar created a sensation at 
a small dance at Alec’s fraternity house. The next 
day Dagmar’s telephone resumed its activities. A 
Jim, and a Jerry, and a melancholy Mike came into 
Dagmar’s life. She was escorted to theatres and 
exhibited at parties. A period began in which she 
never failed to get up in time for luncheon, and in¬ 
congruous taxicabs drew up in front of Number 
Nine Pearson Street almost daily. 

These manifestations were observed by Marthena 
with an envious uneasiness. These unreflective and 
moderately well-tailored youths were to her as ro¬ 
mantic as even less reflective but better tailored 
moving-picture actors would have been. To the 
side of her which worshipped Dagmar it was curi¬ 
ously fitting that Dagmar should so attract all these 
boys; but when she compared herself with Dagmar 
and realized that her opportunities for acting in the 


THE BELOVED BOY 


205 


role of a lodestar had been equal with Dagmar on 
the night that they had both met Alec Jones, she 
was filled with bitterness and self-detestation, which 
alternated with a jealous hatred of Dagmar. This 
feeling led her to boast about boys in Reliance who 
had been extremely devoted to her. And when she 
saw that Dagmar politely did not believe her, rage 
overwhelmed her and she would throw her large 
figure into a chair in which she would hopelessly 
rock to and fro and dream of the time when she 
could make a brilliant social appearance with Dag¬ 
mar as an enraged spectator. 

But one night when Dagmar came in she found 
Marthena radiant. The boy from Elgin, of whom 
Marthena had boasted, had materialized, and Mar¬ 
thena informed Dagmar that he was coming to take 
her out. And before the young man took Marthena 
out to hold her hand and giggle with her in the dark¬ 
ness of a moving-picture house, Dagmar met him 
and was overcome with a feeling of that nausea for 
her surroundings which periodically seized her. 
Nicky was soiled, he chewed gum, he laughed loudly, 
and he slapped Marthena on the back. “She’ll 
have to give up that sort of person or I can’t live 
with her,” said Dagmar to herself, and thought of 
Alec and Jerry and Mike, any one of whom would 
be exactly the right sort of a boy for Marthena in 


206 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Dagmar’s estimation—“after I have fixed her up a 
little more,” added Dagmar. 

She decided on Jerry and Alec as trainers for Mar- 
thena’s first public appearance. It was to be a din¬ 
ner, and so at half past six the boys came in to the 
flat bearing, somewhat self-consciously, a cocktail 
shaker. Jerry shook the vessel importantly, but 
in Alec’s manner there was a hint of vacillation, sug¬ 
gesting that he was fearful of being unable to evade 
a good-night kiss from his mother. 

Dagmar and Marthena were ready to receive them, 
both carefully dressed in Dagmar’s clothes. As 
they had prepared for the party the great question 
under discussion had been, whether or not Marthena 
would be able to exert a social gift which she pos¬ 
sessed called: “acting natural.” This performance 
of Marthena’s was a manner which she had culti¬ 
vated at a great deal of pains and was calculated to 
show that she was utterly at ease in the most cosmo¬ 
politan society. 

Marthena had two ways of meeting people. The 
first: acting natural, and the second achieving an 
embarrassed silence. When she acted natural she 
was very talkative and interspiced her remarks w T hich 
were all based on the theory that hyperbole is the 
only way of conveying an idea, with exclamation- 
points. Over and under and through her conver- 


THE BELOVED BOY 


207 


sation ran a laugh which gave the effect of ripping 
her sentences out of a garment of mirth which en¬ 
veloped her. “Dagmar and I eat chocolate pepper¬ 
mints after every meal,” would be distinguished 
between these hilarious chuckles. The bewildered 
victim of her natural acting sometimes tried to follow 
her by laughing and making a rejoinder or two, but 
as he generally found himself in a highly hysterical 
state over nothing more than the discussion of the 
weather, he would begin by contenting himself with 
a smile, and would finally, in exhaustion, unless he 
were a viciously well-bred young man, finish by look¬ 
ing at nothing at all with a face devoid of any ex¬ 
pression. 

Marthena never was able to depend upon this 
social gift of hers. The possibility of its not coming 
to her assistance at all would often cause her extreme 
mental anxiety as she prepared to make a social 
appearance. In a burst of grateful homage to Dag- 
mar she dressed with the gay hope that she would 
be able to act sufficiently natural to captivate Alec; 
a feat which Dagmar assured her would be easy. 

When four glasses had been awkwardly poured 
out, Jerry realized with dismay that he had not yet 
made one funny remark. And as he was considered 
by himself and Alec to be the wit of his college, he 
looked quickly up at a frightful reproduction of 


208 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Abraham Lincoln in a frock coat and rescued his 
humorous reputation by observing, with great pres¬ 
ence of mind: “Ah, Andrew !” 

“Hello, President Jackson,” said Alec, laughing 
hilariously with a feeble attempt to carry on what 
he considered Jerry’s wit. 

“My boy,” said Jerry solemnly. “Did you think 
that that was Andrew Jackson ? I’m astonished at 
you. That’s Andrew Volstead, the well-known boot¬ 
legger !” 

“Andrew Volstead,” said Marthena in the rippling 
tones that went with her natural acting. “Why, it 
is not. That’s Abraham Lincoln.” 

Alec and Jerry looked at each other in consterna¬ 
tion. “Are you sure?” Jerry was beginning sol¬ 
emnly, when Marthena, in agonized comprehension, 
exclaimed: “Oh, it was a joke, and I didn’t see it!” 
Her face contracted, and for a moment they thought 
she was going to cry. She rushed from the room, 
and Dagmar quickly followed. Through the fragile 
door of the kitchenette, the two young men heard the 
sounds of low, hurried argument. 

“What’s the difference,” Dagmar was saying. 
“It doesn’t amount to a row of pins.” 

“It was a joke, and I didn’t see it; and, oh, I’ve 
never done anything so awful in my life! They’ll 
think I’m simply terrible! Why am I so stupid? 


THE BELOVED BOY 


209 


They knew all along it was Abraham Lincoln and 
I knew as soon as I said it that they were only fool¬ 
ing. Only it was too late then. . . 

But the prospect of dining out was too unusual 
and thrilling for Marthena seriously to consider 
missing. A few moments later they were whirling 
merrily along in the taxicab, while Marthena was 
striving to recover the ground she fancied she had 
lost by her blunder. 


CHAPTER EIGHT 


THANK GOD, FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S 

LOVE 

“‘All our family are tea-time toilers,’ as Grand¬ 
father Montgomery used to say,” said Dagmar with a 
laugh. She looked across the tea-table in the restau¬ 
rant where Will Freeman had brought her, with the 
smile lingering warmly on her face. Never, she said 
to herself, had she been so glad to see any one as she 
was to see Will. She had been astonished to receive 
a telephone call from him that morning. 

“I overhear her at dinner parties,” said Will who 
had been telling Dagmar about her mother: Dag- 

mar’s such a brave girl, such endurance ! Really, it 
worries me. She used to be quite frivolous ! ’ ” 

Again Dagmar laughed. “Isn’t that ridiculously 
like mother? I’d love to see her. I’m really not 
doing a thing but loaf on this job. The whole idea 
of it is becoming frightfully absurd. I don’t seem to 
be getting anywhere at all.” 

“You’re like your grandfather, Dagmar. He 
might have been a power in the new country in his 
day, but he preferred to be just a charming sluggard 


210 


FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S LOVE 


2 11 


instead. And I have always been inclined to think 
that you were one too.” 

“I’m not quite as bad as Aunt Etholla, you’ll have 
to admit,” said Dagmar. “I do have enough energy 
to pour tea for my friends, but-” 

‘‘That’s the reason you ought to marry me,” said 
Will. He looked at her grimly. He had thought 
himself capable of controlling his emotional impulses 
rationally; that the well-springs of passion were 
long since dried up in his nature, and as he said it he 
realized with a faint but suffering irony that a num¬ 
ber of plans which he had laid up for his future, even 
his old age, were from this moment wrecked beyond 
remedy. From her childhood Dagmar had diverted 
him. He had admired and loved her grandfather, 
and had once seriously considered offering himself 
to her mother. But the idea of marrying her would 
certainly never have presented itself to his reasoning 
powers as a feasible experiment. And yet after a 
period of six weeks in which he had worried and won¬ 
dered about her, he found himself sitting opposite her 
at a tea-table and offering himself to her. Dagmar 
was regarding him curiously; somewhat surprised, her 
vanity was in abeyance and she thought to herself 
with a detachment she seldom achieved: “I’ve done 
everything in the world to bring this about, and now 
that it’s come, though I can’t believe that it has come, 



212 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


I wonder why I did it ?” For she was the dupe of 
her own favorite notion that nothing more nor less 
than her own tremendous wiles and witch-like spells 
made her irresistible. 

“Are you in love with me?” she asked. 

Will leaned forward boyishly and caught her wrist. 
“You make me feel like an old fool, Dagmar. Yes, 
I’m in love with you.” There was a wry silence in 
which Dagmar looked down at the cloth and felt 
very young and strange. “Heavens, I must be really 
grown-up,” strayed across her mind, bearing an un¬ 
recognized import: the rest of her life had not been 
as serious as she had thought. “I shall wed Etholla 
and her melancholy platitudes,” said Will, attempt¬ 
ing to break the constraint. They both laughed, and 
Will understood that he had been rejected. He went 
back to St. Paul that night. 

About a week later, on Saturday afternoon, while 
Dagmar was lying lazily on the couch at Number 
Nine Pearson Street, she was roused by a smart in¬ 
sistent rapping. Yawning and stretching, she went 
lazily toward the door and opened it to exclaim: 

“Margaret!” 

Margaret, as always, exquisitely dressed, if a little 
too much in the fashion, stood pitched on the toes of 
her high-heeled and slender slippers, ready to fall 
into her daughter’s arms. “Oh, my child !” gasped 


FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S LOVE 


213 


Margaret. “I have come to you. What a ghastly 
place. My goodness, child, you don’t mean you live 
here? I couldn’t believe it when we stopped . . . 
miles of stairs, darling. I’ve my baggage down¬ 
stairs, but it’s absurd to think of stopping with you. 
Darling, all my life I’ve had ideals about John Pat- 
lock-” 

‘‘What!” exclaimed Dagmar in bewilderment, 
dragging her mother across the room, and seating 
her, with some loss of dignity, under the print of 
Abraham Lincoln. It seemed to Dagmar that some 
dreadful catastrophe must have occurred. Margaret 
went on with no improvement in coherence: 

“I wake up in the middle of the night, and, really, 
hatred sweeps over me so that it’s all I can do to keep 
from taking a hatchet or a poker and just wrecking. 
. . . The radio has wrecked me and that’s no idle 
jest. Dagmar, John Patlock loves the radio more 
than he does his own wife. I did try to destroy it. 
I think I had a right to. He was perfectly furious; 
my dear, if you’ll believe me, he was a brute about it. 
To move out of the house on account of my extrava¬ 
gance, and then when I got it out of Will, though he 
was perfectly enraged, my dear, to think I did get it 
out of him. A proposal, darling, and you had the 
nerve to refuse him; really, Dagmar, I admire you in 
a way for it, but under the circumstances it was very 



214 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


foolish, and to think that the house that my father 
built is to be dragged away piece by piece exactly as 
if we were bricklayers or peddlers or auctioneers or 
something, and he paid three hundred dollars for the 
radio and then accuses me of extravagance; darling, 
could you ring for tea ?” 

Dagmar had attempted to interpose a few com¬ 
ments of her own, but her mother’s eloquence would 
not be stopped. “Perfectly clean, but small after 
our house; not that I haven’t always wanted to sell 
that absurd house on Summit Avenue, but the taxi¬ 
cab is waiting, and really it looks queer to me. Well, 
you know the house as well as I do, it’s the house 
Ben Glidden built five years ago out on Summit, 
John says the up-keep will be less; but of course it 
makes no difference to me what John Patlock says, I 
shall never see him again, and I doubt if I shall ever 
go back to St. Paul again; I have always said it was 
most provincial and full, my dear, of such stupid 
people. After your life here in Chicago I’m sure you 
agree with me.” 

“But, Margaret,” exclaimed Dagmar, “do you 
mean to say that you’ve left John?” 

“He’s been most careless with his money; and, 
really, I think after the dreadful experience I went 
through with your father, losing every cent your 
grandfather left, I think John might have been a 


FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S LOVE 215 


little more considerate. The servants are frightful, 
and I sincerely hope that John Patlock will have a 
delightful time with Etholla in charge of the house. 
Dagmar, what I have suffered from that man with 
my temperament you will never be even able to 
conceive, and how I have loved him! My dear, 
how frightfully odd that lamp-shade is! I think I 
shall go to Haiti and join my darling, darling boy, 
he will have to take care of his mother now.” 
But this picture was too much for Margaret Pat- 
lock, the forlorn widow, and she flung herself down, 
among the stiff-leather cushions and sobbed heavily. 

After perhaps fifteen minutes of this sort of thing 
Dagmar made out that John Patlock had told his 
wife that he could not afford to keep up the big 
house any longer and had accepted an offer from a 
too rich young man about to be married who was 
going to wreck it and build a new house on the site 
which was probably the most desirable one in town. 
“Stone by stone,” said Margaret tragically. “ They 
are going to do it brick by brick. It seems to me un¬ 
speakably cheap; and the most frightful article in 
the paper about it.” A quarrel, Dagmar made out, 
had developed between her mother and John about 
it in which John had accused Margaret of extrav¬ 
agance and she had retorted by taunting him with 
the prices he had paid for his three radios. From 


2l6 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


this she had gone on to accusing him hysterically of 
caring more for the radio than he did for her. In a 
fit of rage she had rushed toward it, and pulled 
futilely at the wires and succeeded in breaking one 
expensive globe before John had caught and held 
her, glaring but helpless. “You brute, you use 
force,” Margaret had done her best to hiss. 

“I certainly do,” John had replied. “Suffering 
beeswax! Do you think I’m going to stand here 
and watch you pull my radio to pieces ? ” “You do 
care more for the radio than you do for me,” Mar¬ 
garet had sobbed, and she added later to Dagmar 
with great passion: “I really think he has a phobia 
about it.” She had countered brilliantly by packing 
her bag, calling a cab, and leaving on the eleven- 
o’clock train for Chicago. With a characteristic 
seizure of the dramatic value of any situation in 
which she could play the heroine, and an equally 
characteristic practical sense, she had left poor John 
Patlock, feeling like the brute she had accused him of 
being, and had arrived to talk over with Dagmar 
the really serious question of her marriage to Will 
Freeman. 

“Where wifi you live when you move?” asked 
Dagmar. 

“I told you that we have taken the Ben Glidden 
house, a perfect box of a place, only three baths. 


FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S LOVE 217 

Really, when we have guests I shall have to issue 
tickets and have every one standing in line as they 
do at the public baths. Perfectly ridiculous. Well, 
it will be a relief to get rid of some of the perfectly 
ridiculous things in our house; and, darling baby, 
when are you going to order up some tea? I’ve 
been waiting years. Have you a cigarette ?” 

Dagmar wilted visibly under Margaret’s steady 
volubility. She explained that she would have to 
make the tea herself, and reluctantly set about doing 
it. “Nonsense,” said Margaret, “my cab is waiting 
below and I might as well go and register at a hotel.” 

During the two days of Margaret’s visit, before 
she went triumphantly back to the penitent John 
Patlock, Dagmar lived with her mother at a small 
expensive hotel. They had barely arrived in then- 
rooms when the telephone rang, and Dagmar had the 
excitement of listening to Palomon Bennett’s voice. 
He had come back to Chicago for good, he enthu¬ 
siastically told her, and was coming to see her that 
night. Margaret guessed at once from Dagmar’s 
manner after the telephone call what Dagmar’s chief 
reason for refusing Will Freeman had been. 

“You’re not engaged to this dreadful boy, are 
you?” she asked Dagmar. 

“No-oh,” admitted Dagmar reluctantly. Her 
heart leaped unbearably at the thought and she 


2l8 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


ardently wished that she could have defied her 
mother with an affirmative answer. 

“I hope not,” said Margaret decidedly. “I never 
could stand the Bennetts. You know how sensitive 
I am. And whenever Priscilla Bennett comes into 
a room where I am I always get perfectly ill. My 
head throbs frightfully and I nearly always have to 
leave the party.” 

“Priscilla is only his uncle’s wife!” said Dagmar 
indignantly. 

“Mercy! How can you figure out such frightful 
things. I feel exactly the same way to Caroline 
Frisbie and Margaret Lewis, and they are his father’s 
sisters. And as for Dick Bennett! ’ ’ Margaret 
shuddered as if all her delicate nervous centres suf- 
ered horrors at the thought of Palomon Bennett’s 
unfortunate grandfather. ‘ ‘ Heavens ! ’ ’ 

“But what have you against Pal,” demanded 
Dagmar. 

“Not a thing in the world except that he’s dumb.” 

“Dumb!” Dagmar almost shrieked. “I never 
heard of anything so perfectly ridiculous. Why, he’s 
the smartest thing I’ve ever met.” A new summit of 
ridicule was mounted each time that Dagmar and 
her mother argued. Each time, both were so in¬ 
credulously astonished at the statements of the other 
that the echolalia of their previous meetings must 


FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S LOVE 


219 


have paled almost to common sense. Margaret 
raised her brows at Dagmar and from force of habit 
showed Dagmar her profile. Wrinkling her fore¬ 
head made her nose appear flawlessly classic. ‘ * Well, 
I see that your intentions at least are serious,” she 
said. “I think that as I have to be a father as well 
as a mother to you I would better speak to the young 
man, and find out what his intentions are, before I 
let him lead my little girl on any more.” 

There was no hint of sarcasm. Margaret seemed 
perfectly serious. At that moment Dagmar hated 
her mother. She was too enraged at the suggestion 
of an unrequited passion, too alarmed for fear her 
mother would actually carry out her threat, to per¬ 
ceive the intrinsic idiocy of the conversation. Mar¬ 
garet’s anxiety to have her marry Will had led her 
to extravagant folly in her talk, but she did have 
enough understanding to know that bringing a ques¬ 
tion of marriage between Pal and Dagmar into the 
open would be ruinous to her hopes. 

That night Dagmar received her caller in the pres¬ 
ence of a fetchingly gowned chaperon who greeted 
Pal as “ You adorable man. ’ 9 Under the deft flattery 
of Margaret, Pal suffered a swift metamorphosis from 
the swaggering impudent boy that he generally was 
to a grave young man of the world who preferred 
to sit quietly talking of what he imagined were seri- 


220 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


ous things to a woman who really understood him. 
He sat back deeply in an armchair and united with 
Margaret in treating Dagmar as a pretty little child, 
expected, as Dagmar afterward wrathfully stated, 
‘ ‘ to prattle by myself among my playthings. ’’ After 
half an hour of it, rage so overcame Dagmar that she 
telephoned to Alec Jones and left in a kind of beaten 
triumph to make Alec utterly miserable for the rest 
of the evening. 

The next evening at six o’clock Pal escorted Mar¬ 
garet to the train which was to carry her back to her 
frantically telegraphing husband. On the way to 
the station, whence Dagmar had unfilially refused to 
accompany her mother, Margaret recounted to an 
utterly convinced Pal the tale of her misunderstood 
life with her husband, to which was added a diatribe 
against her unaffectionate daughter. 

The afternoon had been spent in a heated argu¬ 
ment between mother and daughter in which Dag¬ 
mar had positively refused to return to St. Paul. 
Then Margaret had said with true parental firmness, 
“you will get no more money from home, and you 
can continue to live in this ridiculous little flat with 
those two ridiculous people until you are thoroughly 
tired of it.” 

“You are speaking of my friends,” said Dagmar, 
more conscious than Margaret (who had laughed) 


FASTING, FOR A GOOD MAN’S LOVE 221 


of the nobility of her words. “And as for money, 
you seem to be unaware that I am earning a salary ! ” 

“Then try to live on it, my dear,” Margaret had 
suggested. “Try to get your nails manicured on it, 
and your hair done.” 

“She’ll tire of it very soon,” was one of the things 
that Margaret had confided to Pal. And then, 
thinking to complete the ruin she had so successfully 
begun, she told Pal in confidence that the family 
would probably announce Dagmar’s engagement to 
Will Freeman some time that spring. 


CHAPTER NINE 


PARTY 

Pal’s vanity was pricked by the information that 
Dagmar was to marry Will. It annoyed him to the 
extent of leading him to the telephone to verify it 
from Dagmar. She was out, but Marthena, who 
answered with a profusion of giggles (she was curi¬ 
ous to know what this Palomon Bennett could be 
like) said that she might be in at any time. When 
Dagmar did come home at eleven o’clock the delight¬ 
ful news greeted her that Mr. Bennett had called 
four times. 

Her wounded feelings were somewhat restored and 
the weight of uneasiness that his conduct with Mar¬ 
garet had laid upon her was lifted. When he tele¬ 
phoned the next morning she informed him unen¬ 
thusiastically that she might be able to see him on 
Sunday afternoon if he could find the time to call 
upon her then, but the intervening week, she re¬ 
gretted, found her engaged. 

“Perhaps your fiance doesn’t care to have attrac¬ 
tive young men hanging around,” suggested Pal. 

“Which fiance?” asked Dagmar suspiciously. 
“I have so many.” 

Pal was more relieved by this answer than he 


222 


PARTY 


223 


quite realized, and when Dagmar left the telephone 
elation was her dominating emotion. Every event 
of the week (and she filled every night with meaning¬ 
less engagements) was infiltrated with the intangible 
presence of Palomon Bennett, and whenever she was 
alone, she planned the long conversation they would 
have out of an abundance of crepuscular sentimen¬ 
tality which enshadowed her. 

Martin, who had dimly sentimental relations with 
a dozen women, all of whom he had given unappro¬ 
priate nicknames, had invited an angular young 
woman known to him as Wood Spirit and Dryad 
Girl to come to the flat on Sunday afternoon and meet 
Dagmar and Marthena, disguised in the invitation as 
Martin’s two kiddies. When Martin told Dagmar 
about it, it occurred to her that, as a further means 
of punishing Pal, she would fill the rooms with people 
and he would enter to find himself in the midst of a 
party. 

She therefore told Marthena that a party was to 
be arranged all for her sake. Dagmar even told 
herself that it was to be all for Marthena’s sake. 
And as Marthena’s intimate, Ida Orsi, had come to 
Chicago to study dressmaking, she was invited, as 
were Alec and Jim and Jerry and Mike, all of the 
University. 

Ida arrived first on that eventful Sunday, and 



224 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Marthena entered easily into her favorite recreation 
of natural acting. By the time that Alec made his 
bashful entrance, she had worked herself up to such 
a state that there was no stopping her high spirits. 
She giggled, she roared, but no vocabulary of laugh¬ 
ter could do her justice, and in between her spasms 
of mirth she ejaculated sentence after sentence, 
which could only be called unsuccessful in that they 
failed in their object of fascinating Alec. 

Martin arrived next with the Wood Spirit, whose 
name was Kate McIntosh. She was a sensible 
young woman in rubbers, whose countenance was 
decorated with a faint mustache. “I must show 
you,” said Martin to her, “a book of quaint, odd 
etchings.” And they withdrew at once spiritually 
and sat whispering in a corner for some time. The 
rest of the party, consisting of Jerry and Jim and 
Mike who were coming together, and also of Mr. 
Palomon Bennett, were all fashionably late. Mar¬ 
thena knew, for she could not have lived with Dag- 
mar and remained ignorant of the fact, that the 
most interesting member of the party to Dagmar 
would be the last. She was very curious to see 
what he looked like, and from the moment of the 
first arrival began to entertain fears of his not ar¬ 
riving, which she whispered to Dagmar at frequent 
intervals. In this way she assisted Dagmar in 


PARTY 


225 


developing, out of a faint feeling of uneasiness, an 
exaggerated fear which grew into a mental cer¬ 
tainty that Pal would not come at all. Dagmar’s 
intense eagerness to see Pal frightened away her 
hope. She began to talk in nearly as excited a 
fashion as Marthena, thinking all the time, “the 
invitation wasn’t very definite, perhaps he won’t be 
able to find the place.” She strained once at the 
sound of a footstep and found herself saying to 
Martin (in what connection she could not imagine) 
that she feared she was a dreadful source of trouble 
to him. ‘ ‘ Oh, no, ’ ’ Martin was assuring her. “You 
are a bright spirit, ” when she was aware that Mar¬ 
thena was beckoning to her from the kitchen between 
spasms of mirth that she was attempting unsuccess¬ 
fully to conceal. 

She whispered to Dagmar, who had joined her: 
* ‘ That Alec must be crazy or something. He’s bob¬ 
bing up and down like everything every time I come 
in or go out of the room. What is he doing it for ? ” 

“It’s a sort of custom,” said Dagmar, as always, 
feeling at a loss when Marthena asked her to explain 
social conduct. “It’s because he is so anxious to 
make a good impression, he’s trying so desperately 
to be correct. He-” 

She broke off, being unable to explain her appre¬ 
ciation of the fact that Alec was in agony at the idea 



226 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


of the unconventionality of Dagmar’s situation, and 
was striving in every way to conform to the man¬ 
ners of a society from which, he felt, Dagmar should 
never be separated. His attempts to be formal in 
that crowded room were a product of this innate 
conviction and of the embarrassment which his 
youth felt in the presence of his adored one. He 
endured all the tortures that a bashful and sensi¬ 
tive person can endure in the company of his fel¬ 
lows, and felt in a dim way that he was making an 
ass of himself. But all his faculties were confused 
and lost in the mesh of the emotion he felt in 
Dagmar’s presence, and he hardly knew clearly 
what he did, but prayed like a lost soul that he was 
doing the correct thing. 

“What do you mean, custom?” Marthena’s 
laugh rippled in and out of the words. “I never 
saw any one keep getting out of a chair and back 
into it again like that. ” 

“When a woman comes into the room a man 
always rises from his chair,” explained Dagmar, 
annoyed because she had to explain a fact obvious 
to her. 

“Do you mean to tell me that every single time 
a girl comes into the room a man has to jump out 
of his chair ?” asked Marthena with a rising note of 
incredulity in her voice. 


PARTY 


227 


“Oh, well, people don’t carry it to extremes, ” said 
Dagmar. ‘ ‘ Only a man is not supposed to sit down, 
while a woman is standing. ” 

“What!” shrieked Marthena, and she stifled her 
laughter which came plunging out in a perfect Vesu¬ 
vius of naturalness. She shrugged her shoulders 
and gave Dagmar a look which conveyed the fact 
that she was not to be taken in any more by Dag- 
mar’s pleasantries. She walked back into the sit¬ 
ting-room, and little Alec faithfully got up out of 
his chair as she entered. She walked to the side of 
the room, looking out of the comer of her eye at 
him, watching to see whether he would seat him¬ 
self or not. Poor Alec looked uncertain, bent his 
legs as if to sit down, rose to his feet and tried to 
appear as if he were standing because he preferred 
to stand. He glanced at Martin, who sat placidly 
on the couch, undisturbed by any of the niceties 
of conduct which were causing Alec so much tor¬ 
ture. 

“Ida,” snickered Marthena, “come on out in the 
kitchen a minute, will you?” 

Ida, who was not gifted with the faculty of nat¬ 
uralness, rose uncertainly and followed Marthena. 
As they left the room, Alec sank once more into his 
chair; but he was not to be allowed a respite by the 
implacable Marthena, who had no notion that she 


228 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


was being cruel. In the kitchen she had conveyed 
the news to Ida and had asked her assistance in the 
process. But Ida demurred bashfully, though she 
was highly amused. “You just go back in the room, 
then, and sit down, and as soon as he gets good and 
seated I’ll come into the room and sit down, then 
you get up and go back in the kitchen. ” 

Ida went back into the little sitting-room, and 
Alec, reddening, glanced about him and started to 
rise, but Ida, crossing hastily and self-consciously 
to her chair, did not give him time. She caught 
Marthena’s eye from the kitchen, and snickered. 
Marthena then entered slowly and stood giggling 
by Ida’s chair. Alec, with the perspiration of agony 
on his forehead, clung to the arm of his chair piti¬ 
fully, and breathed a sigh of wonderful relief as he 
heard the loud approach of his three friends, Jerry 
and Jim and Mike. 

It was only a few moments after this that the 
youthful Mr. Bennett walked in, evidently under 
the delusion that he was making a fashionable after¬ 
noon call. He not only carried a stick, he wore an 
air. This air, which was immediately intensified 
as his eye fell upon the scene of attempted Bohe- 
mianism, epitomized one of the most acute cases of 
world weariness ever displayed. His few months in 
New York, he secretly considered, with a conviction 


PARTY 


229 


which he at once admirably expressed by his actions, 
had made him into a blase and bored person who 
could have little interest in such proceedings as the 
ones he saw before him. 

Marthena’s natural acting was quenched by the 
entrance of this large, actively bored person, who at 
once dominated the company. He placed himself 
in the largest chair and addressed his remarks 
exclusively to Dagmar. He did not encourage any 
one to speak to him, but when he was directly 
addressed he rejoined with a positive wisdom which 
intimated that he was able to give an exhaustive 
lecture upon the subject if he chose, only he did not 
choose. 

His conversation was largely about the young 
women of indeterminate character with whom he 
had been consorting. Alec, listening and watching 
Dagmar’s absorption, was lost in such an abyss of 
pain that Marthena’s attempts to torture him or to 
draw him out alike passed unobserved. The obses¬ 
sion descended upon him that Dagmar was wasting 
herself on a man imworthy of her, and Pal’s absurd 
posturings were to him deadly serious betrayal of a 
sinister character. And Marthena, striving des¬ 
perately to crawl out from under the blanket of 
unnaturalness which had enmuffied her on Pal’s 
entrance, began to shriek her sentences until her 


230 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


courage returned and she began to enjoy the party 
once more. 

Every fifteen minutes Pal would whisper to Dag- 
mar in a voice perfectly audible to the rest: ‘ ‘ When 
does this party break up ?” 

But the party at last came to an end and Alec 
began to take an embarrassed leave. Pal, who had 
been getting more and more wicked under the 
shocked eyes of Marthena and Alec, now announced 
in an off-hand manner that he had made up his mind 
to present Dagmar with a suit of pajamas. Alec, 
whose hand was on the door-knob, opened his mouth, 
gasped, and made a hasty retreat. 

It was now about nine o’clock, and Pal and Dag¬ 
mar issued from the building and went in search of 
a jazz orchestra. 

“Marthena has no brains, ” announced Pal as they 
sat down in a German restaurant. He was prepared 
to issue his opinions to Dagmar like little pamphlets. 
“I should think you would go insane listening to her 
giggle like that. She’s impossible. . . . What do 
you want to eat ?” 

He went on commenting happily about the party. 
How amusing it was that such totally different per¬ 
sons as he and Alec should find the same girl so 
charming. 

“The veneer of sophistication is dropping away,” 


PARTY 


231 


remarked Dagmar, “so you find me charming-” 

But as they walked through the cold snowy eve¬ 
ning, glowing from the exercise of dancing and walk¬ 
ing, Pal began to talk about himself in that cur¬ 
tained, shy way which people use when they are 
approaching that sacred drape that covers their 
secret aspirations. Pal talked vaguely of a thing 
which he had greatly desired, but had given up, in 
a way which conveyed little or nothing to Dagmar, 
but which moved Pal emotionally to such an extent 
that, as he said good-by to her, he seized one of her 
hands and kissed the palm of it impulsively and a 
little breathlessly. 

Dagmar entered the apartment flushed and some¬ 
what excited. It was evident that Marthena was 
still good for another hour or more of discussion. 
“I think it went off well, don’t you ?” she said again 
and again, and went merrily through incident after 
incident of the afternoon and evening. 

Dagmar, who was as eager to talk of Pal as is a 
pot of coffee that has reached the boiling-point to 
go over the top of the container, sat down cross- 
legged on the couch and animatedly directed the 
flow of incidents to the ones in which he had fig¬ 
ured. 

But the mention of his name quenched Marthena’s 
bubblings as effectively as his actual presence had 



232 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


done that afternoon. She grew restive and reticent 
under Dagmar’s gaily colored narrative of her eve¬ 
ning since she had left the party, and it became ap¬ 
parent that she had something to say to Dagmar 
which had put her at a loss for the proper words. 

“I don’t think you ought to go out with him,” she 
said at last, to Dagmar’s astonishment. 

“What do you mean? What in thunder do you 
mean ?” asked Dagmar. “Are you crazy ?” 

“I don’t know exactly how to tell you how I feel 
about him, but in some ways you’re so inexperienced, 
and a fellow could put so much over on you. . . .” 
She paused, horribly dashed at Dagmar’s stare. 

“Pal is just a boy,” said Dagmar. “If you have 
any melodramatic notions that he is going to ruin 
me or something-” 

Marthena began to stammer. “Oh, you’ve had a 
lot of experience and you know more than I do about 
how to act and lots of things, but there are some 
things about boys that you don’t know and that I do 
know, and this Pal—well, he reminds me of some¬ 
thing a boy I knew in Reliance-” 

Dagmar, very much incensed at the idea of Mar- 
thena’s daring to criticise Pal, replied angrily: “The 
idea of Pal reminding you of anybody in Reliance!” 

Tears gathered in Marthena’s eyes. “Dagmar, 
don’t be mean. You know I only told you for your 




PARTY 


233 


own good. I’ve been worrying all evening because 
you were out with him. He’s just not the right 
kind, and I couldn’t bear to see anything happen to 
you.” 

“You’re utterly absurd,” said Dagmar, irritated 
by the tears of Marthena, but still more by the con¬ 
viction in her tones when she said: “He’s not the 
right kind.” This sentence in its very phraseology 
was enough to lend dignity to Marthena’s accusa¬ 
tion. “We’d better go to bed, it’s more than late,” 
said Dagmar. 

They undressed with unusual quickness, their en¬ 
thusiasms of a few moments before suddenly quelled 
by their discussion. When the light had been turned 
out Marthena’s voice floated timidly to Dagmar: 
“Please don’t be angry with me, only I know things 
about boys that you can’t even imagine, and I can’t 
bear to think—” she paused at the sound of Dag¬ 
mar turning her head angrily on the pillow. “You 
see, Pal is so big, and—well, such a man, that even 
if he had the best intentions in the world-” 

A firm determined knock on the door interrupted 
her words. “Who on earth can that be,” exclaimed 
Dagmar, and the instantly terrified Marthena whis¬ 
pered imaginatively: “Pal!” 

“I’ve had enough vile insinuations about Pal,” 
Dagmar snapped suddenly as she rose and fumbled 



234 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


for her dressing-gown. “Who on earth can be com¬ 
ing at this time of night? ” she thought. 

“You’re not going to the door?” said Marthena. 
“You can’t be going to open it. Why, Martin’s not 
here, and it might be something-” 

“Oh, hush,” said Dagmar crossly. “It’s probably 
a telegram.” 

But Marthena rushed to the door. “Who’s 
there,” she whispered excitedly. 

A man’s voice answered. “I beg your pardon, 
but is this where Miss Dagmar Hallo well lives ? ’ ’ 
The tones were familiar to Dagmar, yet it was im¬ 
possible that it could be. . . . “Yes, Miss Hallo well 
is speaking,” she answered. 

“Dagmar!” She knew. It was Herbie. “Your 
long-lost brother. ...” She ran to the door. 

“It might be just a plan to get the door open,” 
whispered Marthena, unwilling to relinquish her 
position, but Dagmar pushed her aside. 

“Herbie, I thought you were in Haiti. Just a 
moment. We’ve gone to bed and our sitting-room’s 
a bedroom at night, but in a moment I’ll let you in.” 

He came into the room and Marthena almost 
shrieked at the sight of him, for he was abnormally 
tall, six and a half feet, though he looked sheepish 
and his hands hung down awkwardly and seemed too 
big even for his enormous height. He still had the 



PARTY 


235 


touch of distinction that Dagmar had, a grace even 
in his awkwardness. And his eyes, big and brown 
and shining, had the winning likable quality of a 
child’s. 

They met with many exclamations and the joy of 
a brother and sister who have romanced about each 
other’s perfections. Herbie was vague as to the 
cause of his sudden appearance, but it developed 
that he had no money, and no place to go. It was 
decided that Herbie could sleep on the floor in Mar¬ 
tin’s room for that night. 














BOOK THREE 


THE CAKE OF IDLENESS 







CHAPTER ONE 


THE GRANDSON OF A SLUGGARD 

Marthena, as usual, awoke earlier than Dagmar on 
the following morning. She heard the loud breath¬ 
ing of Herbie echoing through the flimsy partitions. 
Prompted by an irresistible curiosity, she glanced 
at Dagmar who was lost in sleep and then peeped 
into the room where Herbie lay at his morning slum¬ 
bers. Martin had gone and Herbie lay on the nar¬ 
row bed, one long lean arm thrown over his head in 
the abandoned posture of sleep. He looked particu¬ 
larly youthful and innocent in spite of his mammoth 
size, and in the flushed radiance of his dreams his 
large features had a grand aspect, like those of some 
noble beast. Marthena had the subconscious feel¬ 
ing that if he would only close his mouth he would 
achieve the harmony of completeness; a feeling that 
he had not been at all able to give the night before, 
standing sheepishly upright with his long arms hang¬ 
ing guiltily down as if they had no business to be 
attached to his person. 

She dressed slowly, thinking that he was rather at¬ 
tractive. She was elated because he seemed in some 


239 



240 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


subtle way to belong to the boys she was accustomed 
to, while being at the same time undoubtedly at¬ 
tached to Dagmar. It was a faint, obscure link, 
but at its first appearance it gratified her enormously. 

When she was leaving, she awoke Dagmar as was 
her custom. Dagmar, turning reluctantly in her 
bed, remembered that Herbie had come the night 
before and that she must talk to him before she left 
for work. But when, after half an hour of hesita¬ 
tion, she arose and dressed, she found it impossible 
to awaken Herbie. She called to him, she shook 
him, she finally screamed in his ear, but he only shook 
her off and muttered in his sleep. When hunger 
drove her out of the house, she went to work, leaving 
a note for Herbie, and found him, at four o’clock that 
afternoon, just completing his morning toilet. 

As they went out to a restaurant to get his break¬ 
fast, he told her that he had been discharged from 
the Marine Corps for sleeping on duty, not once but 
three times. As she listened to his story, Dagmar 
felt such a sinking of the heart as she had never 
known before. “Have you told Margaret and 
daddy?” she asked, unconsciously falling into their 
childhood name for John. 

“No,” said Herbie, somewhat sheepishly, “John 
said he washed his hands of me when I went in the 
Marine Corps. He was damn sore about it. I don’t 


THE GRANDSON OF A SLUGGARD 


241 


blame him,” he added philosophically and for¬ 
givingly. As she looked at Herbie, penniless, in¬ 
competent, and sensed at last that he had come to 
her to be helped because she was his elder and his 
sister, a sick feeling of responsibility came over her. 

“You’ll have to get some clothes,” said Dagmar, 
“I have a little money I can let you have, but it’s 
only fifty dollars. You’ll have to wire John, I guess. 
But John is hard up just now, Margaret says, and I 
really think, Herbie, that you ought to get a job 
and support yourself.” 

“That’s exactly what I think, too,” said Herbie 
heartily. “I intend to go into some business and 
earn my own money from now on. You know, I 
was a fool to join the Marines in the first place, be¬ 
cause a man really ought to go to Annapolis if he 
wants to go in for that stuff seriously.” There was 
no suggestion in his manner that he who at twenty 
had still been struggling with precollegiate studies 
would have experienced any academic difficulties in 
the Naval Training School. The implication was 
that one of his social position could, of course, be¬ 
come an officer—merely by observing the conven¬ 
tional preliminaries. 

The dishonorable discharge of her brother weighed 
on Dagmar heavily, for she held most of the national 
ideals, and had lived through the war when the pro- 


242 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


fession of fighting is always raised to a place of glori¬ 
fication. A secret shame for her brother, which she 
supposed he shared, kept her from speaking of it any 
more. As for Herbie, it seemed to him to be a not 
too unfortunate incident in his life, since it now gave 
him an opportunity of plunging into the new and 
untried future lacking in the machine-like regularity 
to which a number of schools and the United States 
Marine Corps had endeavored unsuccessfully to 
make him conform. 

“I have a friend who, I think, can get you a job,” 
said Dagmar, thinking of Pal, who had a number of 
young men working under him. They turned into 
a white-tabled restaurant at which Herbie shrugged 
his big shoulders and protested that he couldn’t 
eat in such a hole. “We can’t afford a better place,” 
said Dagmar crisply, and hunger and a naturally 
docile spirit inclined him to follow good-humoredly. 

“That’s an awful dump your living in, Dag,” he 
said, when a large amount of food had been set before 
him by a waitress, visibly impressed with his manner. 
“How’d you ever come to find that school-teacher 
gink. Never could stand that profesh, myself. By 
the way, do you think I could write some articles 
for the magazines about Haiti or the Marine Corps ? 
Still,” he reconsidered, for the idea had evidently 
originated at that moment, “I imagine it would be 


THE GRANDSON OF A SLUGGARD 243 


quite a lot of work, and I’d probably get just as much 
money for lecturing about it. What do you think ? ” 

“Oh, Herbie, you couldn’t,” said Dagmar, ap¬ 
palled, as she thought of every one’s finding out 
that Herbie had been discharged from the Marines. 
“Listen, dear,” she went on, giving her fifty-dollar 
check to him, “please go and get yourself some 
clothes and let me find a job for you, and then 
when you’re on your feet and doing splendidly, we’ll 
write and tell Margaret and John about you.” 

Herbie’s brown eyes thanked her, and as she saw 
the little-boy look in them that had always meant 
her little brother to her, she could have kissed him, 
so strongly did pity and love well up in her heart. 

She needed all the pity and love she could muster, 
for Herbie came in late that night without his new 
clothes and admitting with cheerful shame that the 
fifty dollars had been lost in a game of chance which 
as nearly as Dagmar could make out was a combina¬ 
tion of pool and craps. 

They wired John Patlock who sent a hundred dol¬ 
lars and an imperative summons to Herbie to come 
at once to St. Paul. But Pal had already promised 
Herbie a job, and on consideration, which took place 
over the long-distance telephone between John and 
Dagmar, it was decided that it would be better for 
Herbie to keep out of St. Paul, and John finished over 


244 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


the wire: “Not another cent will he get from me until 
he shows that he can amount to something.” 

Pal was manager of a number of young men who 
went about the city finding out the credit possessed 
by business firms, for other firms and individuals 
who wanted to know. Herbie became one of these 
young men, and on the first morning, smartly out¬ 
fitted in a new suit, he reported at the astounding 
hour of eight o’clock. 

The next morning he appeared at eight-thirty, 
the third morning at eleven, and that night Pal 
called Dagmar up to remonstrate with her. “He’s a 
brother of yours and a nice fellow, Dagmar, but 
honestly it’s bad for office discipline to have a man 
like that on the job.” 

Dagmar made a splendid effort the next morning 
to get Herbie up. He had rented a room on the 
second floor of the same building, which, like Martin 
Plunkitt’s room, had its own entrance to the public 
hallway. Her own energy was fast being sapped by 
the demands that were being made on it, and she had 
not reported at her own office for three days. She 
had telephoned Mrs. Jones, who sympathetically 
urged her not to overtax her strength, though there 
was a hint in her kind manner that perhaps the work 
was, after all, too much for Dagmar. After her 
triumph, the next morning, of getting Herbie to work 


THE GRANDSON OF A SLUGGARD 245 

only fifteen minutes late, she started out briskly on 
her own work, stirred by shame at Mrs. Jones’s in¬ 
dulgence, to one of her periodic outbursts of energy. 

Dagmar floundered in the laziness that engulfed 
her like a man travelling painfully through deep mud. 
Coming out of her natural, luxury-loving, easy en¬ 
vironment, impelled by some obscure inward desire, 
involved for her the same struggle that, imaginably, 
some water animal of prehistoric times might have 
felt on leaving the sea to dwell on land; the same 
suffocation engulfed her at times, forcing her back 
into the deeps of her own lassitude. But, once there, 
always she was unhappy, chafed at the thought that 
somewhere within her she sheltered, too well, an. 
entity, splendid but fragile, which might some day 
die. When this feeling became strong enough she 
would summon her energy, and begin to travel, like 
the incorrigible little sciolist that she was, down the 
first roadway that seemed to open toward any one 
of the goals she thought she might like to reach. 

For days at a time her vague ambition would leave 
her altogether and she would be walking along an 
unfamiliar way to an unknown destination. Behind 
her lay the smooth pleasant surface of everything 
she had left, and she would think in bewilderment 
that she had been a fool. And then, inertia seizing 
her in its vapory negative clasp, she would remain for 



246 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


days going about the things she had to do in a dreamy 
way, so that they were recognizable as the deeds 
they were meant for only in outlines. 

But now, stirred by an undercurrent of fear that 
she would never be able to overcome the family lazi¬ 
ness in herself, which was so glaringly pictured in 
Herbie, and a little frightened for fear it would come 
to Pal’s notice in its more revolting aspects, she was 
fired with a vital busyness which lasted for almost a 
week. She was occupied not merely with her own 
affairs but with those of Marthena and of Herbie. 
She straightened up their rooms in the morning with 
a thoroughness of which she was intermittently ca¬ 
pable, thinking as she worked how easy and pleasant 
work really was, once it was embarked upon. 

“I’m happy working,” said Dagmar to herself 
one day when she was applying a dust cloth to the 
long cretonne-draped lamp. Her eyes blurred with 
tremulous, emotional tears as she thought that if 
she could spend her life in just ordinary work, with 
Pal beside her, she would always be happy. “ But, 
if I can’t keep it up,” she thought pitifully, with a 
sickening fear of Pal’s scorn—“if I can’t keep it 
up! . . .” 


CHAPTER TWO 


ALEC 

“ It’s just what I expected,” groaned Will Freeman. 
‘'One of the worst I’ve ever seen.” He sat gloomily 
beside Dagmar on an uncompromising bench in the 
Chicago Art Institute, staring sardonically at an ex¬ 
hibition of pictures by a young woman distantly re¬ 
lated to him. “ Now, she’ll ask me what I think of 
it and I shall either have to lie, or spend the rest of 
my life in the midst of a family feud ! Dagmar, why 
didn’t you restrain me from coming to this thing? ” 

Dagmar sat admiring a pair of fawn-colored 
French gloves that she had purchased that morn¬ 
ing and thinking of Pal. The gloves smelled faintly 
of wet leather through the perfume that had been 
applied to them, for the day outside was half-heart¬ 
edly rainy. She thought little of what Will was 
saying, but listened with an amiable appearance of 
interest. 

“I might have known exactly the sort of pictures 
that Amelia would paint,” went on Will, “after read¬ 
ing an interview with her in one of the art maga¬ 
zines. There was a picture showing Amelia in a 

walking costume and with her arms clasped around 

247 



248 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


the neck of a large St. Bernard dog. ‘ I love the 
open country,’ she was saying, T hate the town!’ 
And from babyhood Amelia has refused to come even 
to St. Paul on the ground that it was rural and be¬ 
cause she cannot exist, she says, in any town smaller 
than London.” 

Dagmar stifled a small yawn. “ I see that you feel 
yourself hopelessly incarcerated in my conversa¬ 
tion,” said Will. “Perhaps you’d like to hear 
some news of your family? ” 

“I don’t mind,” said Dagmar. 

Will described Margaret and John in their new 
home, and shook his head over John Patlock. ‘‘ He’s 
lost a lot of money, and it worries me. Margaret 
goes on just the same, and she doesn’t seem to realize 
the seriousness of the situation.” There was a pause. 

“You ought to marry me, Dagmar,” said Will. 
“I’m perfectly disinterested about it. A man my 
age can be, you know.” He thought that he really 
was. 

“I don’t know,” said Dagmar vaguely. “I like 
you a lot, but I don’t think it would do.” 

“If you can’t marry me, for Heaven’s sake marry 
somebody that can take care of you. I never have 
seen such a preposterous situation as the one that 
you are in. I always thought Margaret had a grain 
or two of common sense somewhere under that 


ALEC 


249 


idiotic youth of hers, but now I know I was wrong. 
She is a confirmed old rake with no conscience, 
and-” 

“She wants me to marry you, though,” said Dag- 
mar smiling. 

‘ ‘ Of course she does, and merely because she thinks 
the marriage would have a certain chic in the eyes 
of St. Paul.” 

The next day they rode together through the 
park in the late afternoon, and Dagmar, as she 
realized that he was leaving, felt a sudden nostalgia. 
A swift dream of what marriage with Will would 
mean swept over her. A welcome from the town of 
approving enthusiasm, hundreds of parties, new 
clothes and more new clothes, and herself as the 
heroine of twenty important social occasions; a 
honeymoon abroad, with social triumphs in the 
drawing-rooms of Rome and Paris, and the necessity 
of rising in the morning forever gone from her con¬ 
science, a worry that harassed her unceasingly, 
though never to the point of making her erase it. 

They crossed a street and were cantering along 
side by side in a newly widened path. On the right 
a green bank was dotted with picnickers from the 
Italian district, and countless sweethearts were 
wandering hand in hand on all sides. 

“That looks like your brother,” said Will, and 





250 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


pointed to a tall young man who had his hand on the 
arm of a stout girl on the path not six feet away. 

Dagmar looked and saw that it was Herbie, walk¬ 
ing with—of all people, Marthena. He looked con¬ 
fused at Dagmar’s surprised stare, and blushed as he 
lifted his hat. Dagmar rather haltingly explained 
that Herbie had left the Marine Corps, and Will was 
silent; for Herbie had become such a skeleton in the 
family closet that people no longer mentioned him to 
Dagmar, but, from the way Will compressed his lips 
and looked ahead of him, it was evident that this 
latest revelation had shocked and upset him. 

When Dagmar got back to the flat after dining 
and going to the train with Will, she found Mar¬ 
thena alone, sitting on the bed in her night-dress, 
white and scared. “The most terrible thing has 
happened!” 

“To Herbie?” Dagmar was immediately plunged 
into a sea of worried expectancy. 

“No”—even in the midst of her terror, and it was 
evident that Marthena was thoroughly frightened, 
she could give the mention of Herbie’s name a passing 
simper, for had not Dagmar seen her walking in the 
park with him? “It’s that Pal Bennett; honestly, 
Dagmar, I told you that he wasn’t to be trust-” 

“But what happened to him ?” asked Dagmar im¬ 
patiently. 




ALEC 


251 


“Why, he rushed right up here and knocked on the 
door and just insisted on coming in. Well!” She 
paused, but Dagmar still preserved the attitude of 
expectant listening. Marthena, less sure of the mel¬ 
odrama, began to rely on repetition. “Well, he came 
right up to the door and knocked, and I was in bed, 
and I rushed to the door and said, ‘Who’s there?’ 
and he said, ‘Is Dagmar there ?’ And I said, ‘ No, of 
course not,’ and don’t you think that was fun¬ 
ny?” 

“What did he want,” asked Dagmar. 

“That,” said Marthena, stressing a heavy mean¬ 
ing, “is what I wonder. Well, I told him you 
weren’t here, and he said that he would come in 
and wait, and I was mighty glad the door was 
locked—why, I was afraid he was going to break 
the door right down ! ’ ’ 

“Well, what happened,” asked Dagmar. 

“Why, that happened. Imagine him coming up 
here and ...” Marthena related the incident again. 

Dagmar went to bed, losing the incident in a mass 
of bored amusement, which was unmixed with anger 
because she did not realize the enormity of Mar- 
thena’s imaginary concept of Pal. She thought that 
Marthena was insinuating that Pal was attempting 
to have a secret affair with Marthena, and dismissed 
the matter from her mind in the greater curiosity 



252 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


which she felt on the incident of seeing Herbie and 
Marthena in the park together. “We were just 
walking, Dagmar,” Marthena had said with her cus¬ 
tomary decoration of a giggle. And Dagmar, cu¬ 
riously wondering how it had happened, resolved to 
question Herbie. 

But she did not see him again until the next after¬ 
noon, which was on a Saturday, when she found him 
waiting cheerfully for her at the door of her office 
when she came out, with the information that he had 
been fired. “No chance of rising there, anyway,” he 
said. ‘ ‘ Pal has the only good job in the place, except 
for a lot of old fossils, and it’s easy to see that as soon 
as one of them croaks, Pal will get that place, too.” 

Dagmar drew a long breath and wondered dis¬ 
mally what horrible things Pal was thinking of her 
brother. “I’ve got a really good job, now, though,” 
went on Herbie optimistically. ‘ ‘ Advertising. That’s 
where the real money is. I’m going to start Monday 
on the Chicago Tribune, soliciting advertising. Some 
of those birds make two hundred a week. That’s 
better, I guess, than the little measly twenty-five 
I’ve been getting.” 

“Two hundred a week!” said Dagmar incredu¬ 
lously. ‘ ‘ Do they start you out at that ? ” 

“Oh, I don’t get any salary,” explained Herbie 
happily. “I work on commission. That’s the best 


ALEC 


253 

way. From now on, Dagmar, just watch your 
brother. I have my own hours, too.” 

Dagmar spent the afternoon in various small er¬ 
rands for Herbie. She wired John Patlock for fifty 
dollars that Herbie might pay his room-rent, well 
knowing that the generous and easy-going John 
would not question her about it. 

And then, with the strange mystic feeling in her 
breast like the mood of an impending thunder-storm 
moaning faintly beyond a blue lake shrouded in 
twilight, she went to meet Alec Jones who entered 
the melancholy atmosphere of her spirit, and 
clumsily endeavored to comfort her with the inept 
phrases of conventional sympathy. 

“Dagmar, if I could just do something to help 
you,” he said in his yearning, hesitating way. They 
were dining together, and when they were seated 
she noticed, as she often had before, that at table 
with his little legs hanging under the cloth, the splen¬ 
did lines of his handsome head rising above the 
shoulders that were too broad for his body, Alec 
was at his best. Here, with the table before him, 
like a small fortress, he gained a dignity, which in 
the later years of his life he would, perhaps, have 
at all times. 

“Some day, Alec, you’ll amount to something,” 
said Dagmar parenthetically, for she had, of course, 




254 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


no notion of switching the conversation away from 
herself. 

4 ‘Oh, Dagmar!” exclaimed Alec, beside himself 
with the ecstatic sentimentality of the moment. 
‘ ‘ Do you really think so ? If you believed in 
me . . . you’re so wonderful, if you thought I 
could-” 

“I’m not wonderful,’’ said Dagmar, seizing the 
first opportunity to come back to herself with her 
usual cavalier manner in dealing with Alec. “Just 
now, I’m a completely helpless, somewhat fright¬ 
ened girl—” a sense of lyrical thrilling beauty sur¬ 
rounded her as she detached this image of Dagmar 
from herself and almost tearfully regarded it with 
the completely sympathetic Alec. 

“I know,” and rose in that instant to the highest 
pinnacle his manhood had yet reached. It was as 
if hundreds of angelic girl faces seen dimly through 
the mists of his mother’s most nonsensical patter 
were rising toward him and slowly focussing in the 
radiant face of the girl opposite him. He breathed 
deeply, and, holding her gaze with a blushing stead¬ 
fast earnestness, began to talk rapidly. “Dagmar, 
if I could just do something to help you, I believe 
I’d be willing to give my life. You think I’m just 
talking, but I’m not, really, and I want to do some¬ 
thing for you a lot. Something to help you out, 



ALEC 


255 


and—and really it would make me happy just to 
help you. And Dagmar if you ever liked me enough 
to let me-” 

“I do like you, Alec,” said Dagmar uncomfort¬ 
ably, and added hastily, “only I care a lot about 
somebody else, you know, and ...” her sentence 
died and she looked down miserably at the cloth, 
for Alec’s face had worked suddenly into the terrific 
heart-broken contortions of childhood. 

“I know, Dagmar,” his words attempted to cling 
desperately to rationality, but his tones were like 
an animal in pain. “I know, Dagmar, I never 
thought you could care about me, and of course I 
know that you don’t care about me, and that wasn’t 
what I meant at all, because I know, Dagmar.” The 
tears had come out of his eyes and his voice had 
gone, but Dagmar’s eyes were lowered, and awk¬ 
ward sentences rose to her lips and came half-way 
out. . . . “Think you’re splendid.” “I know, Dag¬ 
mar,” repeated Alec idiotically. “I never thought 
for a minute that you could care for me in that 
way. I wouldn’t expect it of you. Why, I’m not 
half-” 

“You have a bad inferiority complex, Alec,” 
said Dagmar, striving for a lighter tone, and Alec 
giggled hysterically. 

“I guess that’s it,” he said. “Dagmar, you don’t 




256 LAZY LAUGHTER 

understand, it’s just that I’d like to do something 
for you-” 

“You have done a lot for me, Alec,” said Dagmar, 
because the sentence fitted in well and seemed to 
thicken the surface of things back to decency. 

“But there is one thing that I’ve thought of,” 
said Alec. “But it seems so stupid to mention it. 
You never eat in cafeterias, do you ?” 

“Oh, yes, I do,” Dagmar reassured him with a 
facial gesture meant to show the democratic spirit 
of Dagmar Hallowell. 

“Well, I thought, you know—I thought—well, you 
know you said you hadn’t much money and Herbie 
being out of a job—well—” he paused, inhaled deeply 
as if for a dive into cold water; “lots of the fellows 
earn their meals by cleaning off the tables in cafe¬ 
terias; and, honestly, you can get dandy meals-” 

“Herbie wouldn’t,” said Dagmar. 

“Oh, I know that. I know Herbie wouldn’t, but 
I could do it for a couple of hours every day when 
I have nothing else to do, and you see I get all my 
meals at home, and then, you see, you get a sort of 
free ticket, and you or Herbie could go in and eat 
off of this ticket whenever you wanted to—honestly, 
Dagmar, it would save you a lot of money-” 

“Alec,” said Dagmar, “how awfully sweet of 
you!” 





ALEC 


257 


“Then you will,” said Alec, his hazel eyes full of 
emotion, his young, eager face brimming over with 
the gratified feeling of protection he so earnestly 
longed to squander passionately on Dagmar. 

“Alec, I don’t need it; but thank you just as 
much.” 

“I know how you feel, you think you shouldn’t 
accept that much from me; but I’d like to give you 
everything I’ve got, Dagmar. If I only had some¬ 
thing to give-” 

The argument went on for a long time. Alec, 
always too well protected by his mother, inspired 
from childhood with the ideal of taking care of some¬ 
body else, and thwarted always because he was the 
small one, he was the dependent one, and with a 
definite gift for self-sacrifice, had come now to a 
great resolution, all the more potent because to 
him it was unconscious; he was a useless, inferior 
creature, but in some way he would sacrifice him¬ 
self for the glorious being that was Dagmar. 

“I’m awfully glad about you and Pal,” he said 
when he was leaving her at the door. “Really, I am. 
I think he’s a fine chap. And of course he’ll do 
everything for you. But, Dagmar, if there is ever 
anything that I can do, will you let me know?” 

So have all rejected lovers of fiction taken leave 
of their mistresses. This familiar quality appealed 



258 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


sentimentally to Dagmar who responded suitably. 
The cliche, necessarily heartless, though appearing 
its opposite, comforted Alec as only an image can 
comfort, and he went away with the sad, satisfied 
feeling of having lived through moments of great 
importance. 

,■ “Herbie must be up there waiting for me,” she 
thought as she heard the sound of his low-pitched 
but boisterous laugh from a long distance down the 
hall. 

The noise increased as she got nearer and she 
could hear Marthena’s giggle. Martin was out, and 
when Dagmar appeared she discovered that the up¬ 
roar had come from nothing more than a social 
diversion of Marthena’s, called “Making Fudge,” 
which consisted of putting together some edible 
materials suitably mixed in a pan and then getting a 
young man to stir it while it cooked. Throwing 
water and attempting to force a hot spoon down the 
throat of her victim was part of the game, which 
Herbie seemed to be enjoying hugely and Marthena 
let it appear a little too plainly that she considered 
Dagmar’s interruption due to spite. 

While they ate the fudge, Martin came in, and sat 
dreamily thinking of a school-teacher from Des 
Moines that he had named “Child of the West” 
and absent-mindedly trying to hold Dagmar’s 
hand. 


ALEC 


259 


‘ 1 1 think you boys ought to bring us our breakfasts 
in bed,” said Marthena, with a little laughing wiggle 
and a giggling pout. 

“We surely will,” said Herbie gallantly. “What 
do you want ? Bacon and eggs, buckwheat 
cakes ?” 

“Wouldn’t that be just terrible?” shrieked Mar¬ 
thena. ‘ ‘ Isn’t he awful ? ’ ’ 

“An awful liar,” said Dagmar. “He’d never be 
up in time.” 

“You wait and see,” said Herbie. “I’ll surprise 
you two girls in bed, and arrive like the original 
chef of the piece with a tray or two of good solid 
food.” 

“In bed,” screamed Marthena, with a remnant of 
the Victorian tradition that ladies never go to bed. 
“How perfectly awful!” Never had she been more 
natural. Her flushed cheeks proclaimed the con¬ 
sciousness that she knew she was being amusing, and 
in the face of Herbie there was no denial of it. He 
took an elaborate farewell of her in the hall and 
went down on the first floor to his room. Dagmar 
woke the next morning to the pleased conscious¬ 
ness that it was Sunday and that she could lie in 
bed without suffering any sort of qualms. She at 
once resumed her delicious doze, from which she 
was unexpectedly roused by a tremendous thumping 
on the front door. 


260 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“Oh, dear, dear,” Marthena was saying, “who do 
you suppose it can be ? ” 

“I’ve no idea,’’ muttered Bagmar crossly. “For 
Heaven’s sake stop that noise and give us a chance to 
get to the door.” 

“Sleepyheads, sleepyheads,” called the voice of 
Herbie. “Here’s your breakfast.” She threw open 
the door. There stood Herbie, looking more hand¬ 
some and immaculate than she had ever seen him, 
with a huge tray full of food. What tremendous 
force had been in operation to get him out of bed 
that morning Dagmar never positively knew. But 
there he incredibly stood, having arisen of his own 
volition for the first time on record. 

“Of all things!” said Dagmar. “Good Heavens, 
we’re not even dressed! It’s only about dawn!” 

“Look at the way he found me, look at the way he 
found me,” gibbered Marthena, dancing about. 
“Isn’t it terrible ?” 

Dagmar looked at the way he had found Marthena 
and gasped. Her hair, released from the iron wires 
that had bound it all night, hung about her shoulders 
in that ingenuous disorder in which Mary Pickford 
is often found on the screen. A brand-new and lacy 
negligee of an exquisite pink brought out admirably 
the very natural, if a trifle formal-looking pink and 
white of Marthena’s well powdered and rouged coun- 


ALEC 


261 


tenance. “I’ve never been in such a situation before 
in my whole life,” bubbled Marthena in the highest 
possible state of human delight. “I’m so embar¬ 
rassed I don’t know what do do. Go away, you 
terrible, terrible boy, until I can get dressed !” 


CHAPTER THREE 


QUARREL 

“She is sure I have sinister designs on her,” said 
Pal, “and she repulsed me with loathing and re¬ 
pugnance, and not too much politeness.” 

He was walking with Dagmar, and recounting, with 
some amusement, the episode that had caused Mar- 
thena such alarm. A softness in the air hinted that 
perhaps spring might soon be coming. “But it’s 
still a little cold,” said Dagmar. 

“Better fasten up your coat; here, let me fasten 
it.” They stopped while he fussed with her collar. 
Up and down the deserted street, vagrant lights 
only intensified its essential darkness—a way of man¬ 
ifold shadows. Pal laughed. 

“What you laughing at,” demanded Dagmar. 

He explained with a certain uncharacteristic hesi¬ 
tancy that attempted to hide a tenderness that had 
crept into his tone. “The idea occurred to me that 
I might kiss you after I buttoned your coat, and then 
I wondered what would happen if I did. In which 
classic manner would you act ? ‘How dare you, sir ? ’ 
or, ‘Oh, Pal, this is so sudden, ’ and while I was think- 

262 


QUARREL 


263 


ing that I couldn’t imagine you acting either way, it 
suddenly occurred to me that I was a conceited ass.” 
The silence that followed was shattered with electric 
sparks like the bursting of a meteor. They talked 
but desultorily that night, and ten-thirty brought 
their lagging footsteps back to the base of the end¬ 
less stretch of stairs. “Aren’t they awful!” sighed 
Dagmar, and Pal swept her into his arms and carried 
her up the last flight. The long, slow, pulsating 
march upward, eternal in the happening but brief 
the moment it was ended, stopped abruptly as Pal 
set her on her feet with a very untender thud and 
asked her for a glass of water. He brushed his hands 
across his eyes as if to sweep the emotion from his 
face, and Dagmar opened the door cautiously to see 
if Marthena had yet made their home into a bedroom. 

“She’s gone to bed,” said Dagmar, “I’ll have to 
bring the water out.” As she passed through the 
room, Marthena muttered and seemed to cry softly 
in her sleep. She closed the door and stood with one 
hand on the knob, giving the glass to Pal with the 
other. 

He drank slowly and handed the glass back to 
Dagmar, who flicked the remaining drops of water in 
his face. “If you do that again, I’ll kiss you,” said 
Pal, and Dagmar did it again and retreated inside ( 
the door. 


264 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


An intense moodiness seemed to possess Marthena 
the next day. She looked at Dagmar several times 
with heavy reproachful eyes, and sighed porten¬ 
tously. 

“What is the matter?” snapped Dagmar for the 
third time. 

Marthena shook herself and exclaimed at last: 
“Dagmar, why will you persist in pretending that 
Pal was not in this apartment last night after I went 
to bed!” 

Dagmar looked at her with puzzled, frowning 
brows. “What do you mean? I haven’t pretended 
anything of the sort. But, as a matter of fact, he 
wasn’t.” 

Marthena compressed her lips, blinked, and 
snorted. “Well, you needn’t lie about it. You 
thought I was asleep, but I distinctly saw him in 
this very room, sitting on the bed.” 

“You must be crazy,” retorted Dagmar, “and 
please don’t tell me that I lie, because I don’t. He 
was not in the room.” 

The quarrel developed alarmingly. Marthena, 
hearing Pal’s voice in her sleep had probably visual¬ 
ized him so clearly that she was convinced that she 
had seen him. Dagmar, unable to understand why 
Marthena should make such an assertion, passed 
from amazement to anger, and finally said: “Well, 


QUARREL 265 

call up Pal if you don’t believe me, and he’ll tell 
you.” 

“That’s too easy! Of course, he’d stick up for 
you!” 

“You can apologize for that at once, or I’ll never 
speak to you again ! ” said Dagmar heatedly. 

Marthena was shaken, a little frightened by Dag- 
mar’s vehemence. “I didn’t mean a thing, Dagmar, 
only I did see him, honestly I did!” She began to 
whimper, and sat ungracefully down to regard Dag¬ 
mar with an unmoving, because it was unbeautiful, 
pathos. 

Dagmar was already tending to dismiss the scene 
as unimportant. Her self-esteem, which had never 
ceased to regard Marthena snobbishly, demanded 
that Marthena abase herself a little more, and so she 
replied coldly: “This is my last word to you, until 
you apologize for saying that I lied.” 

“I’ll never say that something I saw with my own 
eyes wasn’t true.” Perhaps she hoped for one of 
those long bickering evenings that seem to contain 
an ingredient of spice for some women, but Dag- 
mar’s mouth had closed. Her tirade ended in tears. 

Marthena had a kind of love for Dagmar, inspired 
by the feeling of inferiority she felt combined with 
the gratitude that Dagmar’s association with her 
sporadically roused. Her emotions were perhaps 


266 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


closer akin to hate, for, while the combination of 
qualities which Dagmar represented to her were 
worshipped, the living Dagmar inspired much more 
of envy and jealousy than she did of anything else. 

Dagmar, harassed as she was by the problem of 
Herbie, gave the affair no more importance than it 
merited, except that she childishly held to her vow 
not to speak to Marthena. It saved her many 
wearisome hours of listening to Marthena’s tiring 
anecdotes. When she had anything to say to Mar¬ 
thena she addressed her disdainful remarks to a pic¬ 
ture of Herbie at the age of twelve, which hung on 
the wall. 

Marthena brooded and seemed to sicken under 
Dagmar’s cruelty. She cried herself to sleep each 
night, and one day was unable to attend her filing 
duties in the mail-order house where she worked. 

“You know, Herbert, it’s perfectly silly of your 
friend Marthena to take on so about it,” said Dag¬ 
mar to the picture. “All she has to do to restore 
harmony to our beloved home is to apologize for call¬ 
ing your sister a liar.” 

But Marthena would not retract. Martin, think¬ 
ing that he was taking a very impartial attitude, re¬ 
fused to deliver an opinion, and Herbie, when he 
heard of it grinned his wide, jeering grin, like an 
urchin amused at a practical joke. His position on 


QUARREL 


267 


the Tribune had not been as easy as it had looked. 
While his hours were his own, he found that those 
between three and six in the afternoon were not the 
best time to approach prospective customers, and 
he earned, in the five days that he worked, three 
dollars and nineteen cents. Then, because he 
needed money and also a new suit of clothes, he 
took what he admitted was a temporary position on 
the elevated railroad as a guard. His duties con¬ 
sisted of opening and shutting doors at the stations 
and calling in loud, resounding tones the names of the 
streets where the cars stopped. 

“Course I couldn’t do this in St. Paul,” Dagmar 
overheard him explaining to Marthena, “because of 
my social position.” 

“And, also, possibly, because there are no elevated 
railroads in St. Paul,” said Dagmar. 

Herbie ignored this and continued to Marthena: 
“You see, it furnishes me with a uniform, and just 
now I’m hard up and I can’t afford to buy too many 
clothes. Working’s awfully hard on a man’s clothes, 
you know. I don’t have to start work until eleven 
in the morning, and in the evening—I got to work 
nights, you know—there won’t be many people, and 
I can probably read, or rest, or do anything I like.” 

“Will you give me a free ride ?” asked Marthena 
with three not clearly detached laughs. 


268 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


Herbie frowned importantly. ‘‘Well, I’ll see what 
I can do about passes. You got to come and talk 
to me when I get bored.” 

“You’ll have to learn the names of all the sta¬ 
tions,” said Dagmar, who, on account of her feud with 
Marthena, to whom Herbie was addressing most of 
his remarks, felt somewhat irritated. 

“No, I don’t,” said Herbie. “I just make ’em up. 
If I can’t think what the next station is I’ll just say 
H-a—am Sand-wich,” here Herbie bellowed at the 
top of his voice, “and let it go at that.” 


CHAPTER FOUR 


DISASTER 

Pal, who had caused the trouble between Marthena 
and Dagmar, had been out of town for two weeks, 
and Dagmar had not written him about it. So, on 
an evening of early spring after they had dined to¬ 
gether, Dagmar, who had almost begun to doubt her 
own remembrance in the face of Marthena’s dogged 
holding to her belief, recounted the story to him and 
found a relief from the strain of it in his jesting com¬ 
ments. They walked along savoring the fragrant 
night and their merry tender friendship which had 
been the ardent prelude to their love-affair. 

As Dagmar put out her hand to him to wish him 
good night he stood over her with a frightened men¬ 
ace. “Are you prepared for the doom that is about 
to descend ?” 

Dagmar resorted to a stiff conventionality. “I 
don’t know what you mean,” she said with formal 
coldness, and endeavored to remove her hand from 
his clasp. 

“Dagmar”—his eyes brimmed with the thin layer 
of laughter that overlaid his deeper emotions— 
“you’re a little liar. I’ll count ten before you are 

269 


270 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


delivered to your fate and give you time to get 
ready.” 

He began to count deliberately, holding her 
firmly by the shoulders, while she, with head haught¬ 
ily lifted, as if she were resenting an insult, thought: 
“He won’t dare, he surely won’t dare. What shall I 
do if he does?” for a faintness was undermining her 
limbs. Pal finished his ten counts and kissed her. 

She stared at him with big amazed eyes, aware 
that everything was changed by that kiss. He 
laughed hysterically, trying to put on his bravado, 
like a man struggling into an overcoat, but for him 
too externals had faded away, leaving only Dagmar 
and himself, Dagmar and Palomon. And they 
kissed again, drawn together by a compelling need. 

Suddenly Marthena opened the door, ugly and un¬ 
kempt, in an uncouth garment she called a kimono. 
“Dagmar!” she gasped, as if all the fears she had 
ever nourished had sprung into being before her out¬ 
raged eyes. She burst into tears and closed the door 
abruptly. They could hear her cross the room 
heavily and fling herself into bed with loud, horrible, 
agonized sobs. 

The astonishment of Dagmar and Pal melted back 
again into the ecstatic happiness she had interrupted 
with the slight indulgent smile that gods award 
ridiculous mortals. “I’ll have to go to her,” said 


DISASTER 


271 


Dagmar at last, as the sobs continued. “We’ve 
been having a childish quarrel and she can’t under¬ 
stand about anything.” 

“Let me wait, sweetheart,” he begged. “Dag¬ 
mar, I’ve so many things to tell you.” 

“You can’t to-night,” said Dagmar. “Oh, wouldn’t 
everything be absurd if it weren’t so sweet; but I’ll 

tell you before I go in that I love you—and-” 

‘ ‘ I love you, too, more than a million dreams, Dag¬ 
mar; I can’t say good night-” 

Dagmar returned to Marthena with the dream 
feeling of one who walks upon water. Amid dis¬ 
connected and extravagant sensations she seemed 
to restore herself to the room. Extraneous objects, 
enlivened for an instant in the flood of an impal¬ 
pable radiance, had taken on an exotic significance, 
and it was as if a different Dagmar Hallowell were 
walking into an unfamiliar room. 

“I’m sorry I’ve made you unhappy,” said Dag¬ 
mar. “It was rotten of me!” The unimportance 
of quarrelling struck her, and the trouble with 
Marthena seemed like a harmless microbe doomed 
to die in the electric brilliance of Dagmar’s joy. 

“Dagmar!”—Marthena rose to her feet from the 
bed, and walked like a person in physical agony to 
throw herself on Dagmar—“you don’t know—you 
don’t understand. You think I’m mad at you—or 




272 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


jealous or—but it’s something far, far worse !” For 
inside this door where happiness seemed to be im¬ 
prisoned there was another and very different emo¬ 
tion crouching to destroy it. To Marthena this 
thing had been stalking about for days, filling the 
quiet atmosphere with a rampant agony. 

And now an overpowering longing for confession 
shook her whole being, and she sobbed: “Dagmar, 
you’ve got to know for your own good—I wanted to 
keep it from you—but now, I’ve seen this with 
Pal-!” 

It was as if Dagmar had been set upon her feet 
with a jolt. The insinuation in Marthena’s voice 
inflamed her. “What do you mean—you saw— 
this—with Pal?” 

Marthena’s body shook with sobs. “Don’t be 
angry—don’t be angry, Dagmar. It’s just that 
you’re so inexperienced. You don’t understand!” 
She stopped. She had reached a point where she 
had forgotten everything else but her desire to re¬ 
lieve her mind of its terrible burden. But she was 
afraid, even while she longed to say the words. 

“Stop crying right away and tell me what on 
earth you’re talking about.” 

Marthena gulped and tried to control her hysteria. 
“Your brother Herbie, that you think is so wonder¬ 
ful, has got me in trouble,” she said in a voice strained 



DISASTER 


273 


from repressed sobs. She sobbed loudly and ended 
defiantly, “if you want to know !” 

“In trouble!” Unbelieving comprehension was 
stealing over Dagmar. ‘ ‘ What do you mean ? ’ 1 

Marthena, a little frightened now that she had got 
out the information, suddenly stopped crying. “You 
know what I mean, all right, she said sullenly. 
“He’s gone and taken advantage of me.” 

“Why, you horrible girl,” said Dagmar, “are you 
trying to tell me—” she paused. 

“You’re no better than I am,” said Marthena, 
“hugging that Pal out there in the hall.” 

“Good God, Marthena, don’t you ever dare men¬ 
tion Pal to me again. You’re not fit to say his 
name. I don’t know what on earth to think. . . .” 

“You’re not fit to say his name !” The phrase of 
melodrama lodged itself naturally in Dagmar’s mind, 
and became the key-note of her attitude toward 
Marthena. She attained one more height in her 
mental dominance of Marthena, and the miserable 
girl cowered before Dagmar’s utter mastery of the 
situation. 

The army of the righteous, whose assistance Dag¬ 
mar hitherto had not attempted to command, now 
stood massed at Dagmar’s back as if in military 
order, with guns lifted ready to fire on the abject 
Marthena. 



274 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


No touch of sympathy came to humanize Dag- 
mar or to aid Marthena. The girls were, as always, 
utterly at cross purposes, showing their worst sides 
to each other. 

Cowering, crying, utterly abased between sobs 
and incoherent outbursts, Marthena tried to make 
Dagmar understand. 

“Put yourself in my place,” said Marthena. 
“Think, Dagmar. Think like this: ‘I’m Marthena, 
and I’m living in a little place like Reliance,’ and 
think, say to yourself: ‘I’m coming down the stairs 
with their old worn rag carpet on them, and I’m 
wearing a floppy hat.’ Can’t you think it, Dag¬ 
mar? Think, ‘I’m Marthena! I feel beautiful in 
this hat and I’m wrong about not being beautiful, 
and I’m going out to meet Dagmar. Dagmar 
doesn’t exist yet; she’s something gracious and 
kindly and wonderful, that’s going to teach me. 
And she’s big, and you can’t imagine her because 
she’s like God. 

“‘She’s like God, but as soon as I see her on the 
bridge, she’s more wonderful than I imagined, but 
my floppy hat is all wrong. And everything with 
me is wrong, and I knew it from that first minute. 
But still I keep on trying and thinking, and trying 
and thinking, but she knocks me down whenever I 
try to carry out my thoughts. She doesn’t help me 









DISASTER 


275 


at all. She just knocks me down.’” Marthena 
collapsed in hysterical sobs while Dagmar looked at 
her coldly. 

Marthena regained control of herself to say: 
“Can’t you see me? Can’t you understand? I 
want to be somebody! I want to be something! 
I’ve got to be somebody. And you promised to 
help me!” 

“Do you mean to insinuate that I’m to blame for 
this-” 

Marthena choked. “You’re not to blame! No, 
no, Dagmar, I don’t mean that. Only you’re so 
cold and hard. You won’t understand. Can’t you 
just try and understand a little ? I wanted to have 
people like me, and they wouldn’t. They don’t like 
my looks. They can’t even give me a chance just 
because I’m not pretty— And so, I don’t know—I 
just thought boys would like me better—I wanted 
Herbie to like me—and well-” 

“That’s a fine way to go about it,” said Dagmar. 

“Herbie does like me, anyway. It’s Herbie’s 
fault. It’s your own brother, and you ought to 
blame him just as much as me-” 

“I do blame him,” said Dagmar, “but I blame 
you too.” 

“No, you don’t blame me, you think I’m a bad 
girl, and Herbie’s-” 






276 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“Herbie’s just a child-’’ 

This went on, with both girls getting more ner¬ 
vously exhausted every moment, until three in the 
morning, when Herbie came in. 

He admitted that all Marthena had said was true, 
and cried shamefully and grotesquely. And when 
Dagmar asked him how such a thing could have 
happened, he muttered some vague sentiments about 
his manhood, and added that he hated Marthena. 

That dreadful day passed in a long repetition of the 
various opinions of Dagmar, Marthena, Herbie, and 
Martin Plunkitt—a council which developed noth¬ 
ing but this: Martin and Marthena thought there 
should be a marriage; Dagmar and her brother 
thought there should not be. Herbie’s flaccid 
mouth drooped more and more, his long arms hung 
listlessly at his sides, his big brown eyes stared 
meaninglessly into space, and he fell asleep while 
the battle raged around him. 

The superficial mannerisms of Martin Plunkitt 
were all swept away by the revelation. The ut¬ 
terance of one suitable phrase was beyond him, and 
Dagmar discerned in the naked suffering that was 
revealed in his haggard eyes that same quality 
which she had recognized and described in John 
Patlock as goodness. His upward strivings, absurd 
because they were unsuccessful, had a fundamental 










DISASTER 


277 


basis on what is conventionally called honor, and 
he had always idealized his sister and dreamed of 
her as rising in the world beside him. He was 
helpless and in no way attempted to come forward 
in the role of the avenging brother. In the crisis, 
Dagmar emerged as the strongest person there, be¬ 
cause of her indomitable decision that Herbie should 
not marry Marthena. 

Marthena employed all the resources of the hypo¬ 
chondriac, all those of the sentimentalist, but in 
Dagmar she found a hard, resistless determination: 
Herbie was under age and unreliable, he could not 
support himself, much less Marthena and a child. 
Marriage would mean more children and a life of 
endless squalor for both of them. Marthena who 
had sprung from a life of just such squalor could not 
shudder with Dagmar at the prospect of it. Dag¬ 
mar brutally stated that Herbie had an aversion to 
Marthena, and Marthena, with a slight return of 
her preening, contradicted it, and asserted in the 
presence of the sleeping Herbie that he loved her. 

Pal called up three times, but Dagmar could not 
bear to see him. It seemed that the world she had 
lived in with him was gone. She had been fighting 
ceaselessly, sleeplessly and would fight endlessly for 
her young brother and a vague dead thing called 
the family honor. 


278 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“Herbie is the one to decide, I think,” said Martin 
Plunkitt at one time and went over and shook him. 
They could not wake him, and he slept on in a hor¬ 
rible torpor that was like glue resuming its surface 
after a pin prick. 

“Herbie will do whatever I say,” said Dagmar with 
a slight smile, and Martin knew with a sinking heart 
that she was right. 


CHAPTER FIVE 


THE BRILLIANT IDEA 

In all that hysterical conflict the four were secretly 
agreed on one point: Margaret and John Patlock 
must not be called in. If the Plunkitts had been 
shrewd adventurers they might, perhaps, have used 
the club of publicity on the high-handed Dagmar. 
Both were secretly terrified by the vision of Mar¬ 
garet, which intermittently haunted them, as they 
had seen her for a few moments, standing disdain¬ 
fully in the tiny flat, while she administered a flat¬ 
tery-covered snubbing to them in an easy and pat¬ 
ronizing way of which she was pleasantly mistress. 
Dagmar had the feeling that Margaret would only 
make matters worse by a precipitous interference. 
And she also had a dread (incorrect and founded 
on a mistrust of her mother she had lately developed) 
that Margaret would gossip of it afterward. A 
knowledge of which she was only obscurely conscious 
that John Patlock would support Marthena’s case, 
made her anxious to settle the affair by herself. As 
for Herbie, he was shamefully beaten and would 
have been roused from the lethargy which envel¬ 
oped him only to animosity if the question of his 

279 


28 o 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


mother’s being informed had been brought up. 
For this reason all four of them avoided the names 
of John and Margaret Patlock. 

In the afternoon Martin Plunkitt went to his 
school. Herbie slept on, and Marthena, sobbing and 
calling out frenzied arguments from time to time, 
finally fell into an exhausted slumber. . . . Dagmar 
opened a letter which the postman had delivered 
that morning in an envelope marked with the name 
of the School Lover’s League. 

“My dear Miss Hallo well,” Mrs. Jones had writ¬ 
ten, “while I feel that your services have been, in 
many ways, invaluable to our work, it has seemed 
to me for some time that you were overtaxing your 
strength, and that is something which I can ask of 
no one. It is evident that the tasks which I have 
called upon our girls to perform have been too much 
for your delicate health. Now, the uncertain hours 
and the grinding labor requires (I might almost say 
demands) that I employ girls only of robust health. 
For that reason it is my duty to inform you that for 
the present at least I think it the better part of wis¬ 
dom to sever your connection with the School 
Lover’s League. I wish to thank you personally for 
all you have done; for your splendid work in the 
stockyards as well as your splendid co-operation 
with the ideals and aims of our organization. It 


THE BRILLIANT IDEA 


281 


has all been deeply appreciated. In the hope that 
at some future time your health will permit you to 
resume work among us, I remain, 

Your sincere friend, 

Nella Jones, 

President of the Chicago School Lover's League. 

The paper drifted to the floor and was fluttered by 
the first vagrant breeze of spring, unheeded by Dag- 
mar. It was an ironic reminder that she, Dagmar 
Hallo well, was linked to Herbie, as the servant of the 
inexorable and passive God whose silent indolent 
laughter seemed to echo through the room at the 
sight of his huge enchained victim. “I’m like Her¬ 
bie, I’m like Etholla; I’m lazy,” gasped Dagmar’s 
inner struggling consciousness. She felt herself 
degraded to depths lower than those in which Herbie 
dwelt because of the precious inner thing that was 
Dagmar and which she felt that she was perversely 
killing. 

Like a knife, glancing obliquely just off the heart, 
these thoughts were cutting deeply into Dagmar’s 
self-respect, as if to destroy it forever with one true 
and deadly thrust. “It won’t be, it can’t be,” 
thought Dagmar passionately. “In some way I’ll 
do something that will make everything right.” 
But even as she thought that she would indomit- 


282 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


ably lift herself, she had the futile sensation of a 
man who stands on the ground, inhaling deeply and 
willing firmly to soar away into the air. “I will, I 
will,” she thought. “I’ll do something. I’ll never 
stop for the rest of my life. I’m not going to be 
just a failure.” 

With the sickness that had come from nervous 
exhaustion (she had not slept at all the night before, 
or all that day) she began going about the apart¬ 
ment, straightening furniture, putting away news¬ 
papers, and hanging up Herbie’s hat and overcoat. 
She even got out a mending bag and began to sew 
up a rent that had kept her for two weeks from 
wearing a dress. And finally, at six o’clock, she left 
the sleeping Herbie and the despondent Marthena 
and went to dinner with Pal. To his anxious ques¬ 
tionings she told him only that the most horrible 
thing she had ever dreamed of had happened and 
that some time she would tell him about it. Now, 
she wanted to be with him and forget, only to rest 
in his presence. 

Having dinner with him was almost unbearably 
sweet, and the tears of tired nerves stood in her eyes 
more than once as they smiled silently at each other. 
Afterward they strolled up Clark Street, garish as 
an Eastern bazaar and with the lurking menace, 
reminiscent of stealthy Oriental murders. The elec- 


THE BRILLIANT IDEA 


283 


trie lights lent a bizarre, incongruous brilliancy. 
The sky above, still blue, though darkling shadows 
enveloped the side streets, held a poignant and im¬ 
penetrable sadness for Dagmar, and her feet dragged 
along on the pavements beside Palomon like the 
homeless feet of a ragamuffin. After all, what were 
she and Herbie but two helpless beings with nothing 
in the world, no place to go. The fact that they had 
to go and sit in the park when she and Pal wanted to 
rest, emphasized this feeling with a sudden sharp 
stripping of romance from all her gay adventure 
into the world. They were two weaklings, two de¬ 
pendents, and Pal with his strong young philosophy 
was alien, as incompetent as they, if he only knew it. 

With a sudden shutting out of all thought she 
leaned against him on the park bench. Her over¬ 
tired nerves gave way, for she had not slept at all. 
She sobbed comfortably and luxuriated in the feel¬ 
ing of his warm cheek against her wet one. “Tell 
me about it, darling,” he murmured, “or don’t tell 
me, just as you like.’ ’ 

“Not to-night, Pal, I couldn’t. If you knew what 
it meant to me to have you for this little time, 
you—” she was too tired to go on. As they sat 
silently and so close together, Dagmar fell asleep 
and Pal did not awaken her until it was time to go 
in. They parted reluctantly at last, when she had 


284 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


promised the worried young lover that she would 
go right to bed. 

Marthena had gone out, and she thankfully made 
her bed ready for occupancy. But she had not un¬ 
dressed before Herbie came slowly in. “I guess I’ve 
been fired again, ” he announced lackadaisically. 

A great congestion of despondency seemed to take 
possession of Dagmar’s spirit. “What are you going 
to do, Herbie ? What will become of you ?” 

“If it hadn’t been for that damn father of ours 
I’d be all right. What’d he want to go and lose 
every cent grandfather left us for?” 

“Oh, Herbie, that happened so long ago, don’t 
you realize that you’ve got to do something. That 
things can’t go on this way ?” 

“Yes, that’s so,” assented Herbie, without enthu¬ 
siasm. “Now I got this darn woman on my hands, ” 
his tone was touched with a pale satisfaction in pass¬ 
ing. “I ought to be able to get some of these boys 
around here to marry her, don’t you think? How 
about this Alec that hangs around here so much. 
He’d be all right for her. Fact is, Dagmar, you’re 
too hard on her. For somebody in her class she’d 
be all right. She’s a darn nice girl in some ways-” 

A moment of heaven-sent lucidity allowed Dag¬ 
mar to doubt for a moment that she and Herbie 
were, after all, such Olympian beings as she had 
always supposed. But it faded. Herbie was in a 



THE BRILLIANT IDEA 285 

class far above Marthena, she told herself passion¬ 
ately. Her own brother! 

But before she could form a suitable sentence to 
frame her thoughts they heard some one approach¬ 
ing, and Marthena, looking flushed and curiously tri¬ 
umphant, ushered Alec Jones into the room, dis¬ 
traught and with his eyes searching for Dagmar’s 
with a great gust of sympathy and love behind them. 
Dagmar saw at once that Alec knew. 

“We’re going to get married,” announced Mar¬ 
thena, smiling, and swaying her body in bashful de¬ 
light at the sensation she knew she was causing. 
“Me and Alec.” She looked scornfully at Herbie 
and triumphantly at Dagmar. Alec’s eyes, exalted 
under the ordeal, sublimated his face with a radiance 
that waited for Dagmar’s gratitude. 

“Gee, that’s slick,” said Herbie, taking a hand 
slowly out of his pocket and advancing to congratu¬ 
late his successful rival. Glowing with the fire of 
sacrifice for an ideal, Alec shook Herbie’s hand fer¬ 
vently, for he no more realized what he was doing, 
or what he proposed to do, than does one who walks 
in a dream. He only knew that he was giving all 
he had to Dagmar, and, if he had thought of it, 
would have as gladly confessed fatherhood of the 
child. “I’m sure you’ll be happy. She’s really a 
swell kid, as I told you this evening.” 

“Herbie,” said Dagmar sharply, “did you, you 


286 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


don’t mean to say that you actually suggested to 
Alec what you did to me ?” 

“Oh, but I’m glad to do it, Dagmar,” said Alec 
quickly. “I only want you to know how happy I’m 
going to be, and how much I’ll love doing it—” his 
eager young face pleaded for a sign that she recog¬ 
nized him as her secret vassal. 

Dagmar passed her hands across her eyes. So 
many things had happened, that everything seemed 
to her to merge and blend into one vast cavern of 
chaos in which she and Herbie struggled intermi¬ 
nably. “That’s nonsense,” she said vaguely, but as 
one who repeats a lesson. She had a feeling that the 
intrinsic wrongness of everything could be shown 
up as an underlying rightness, if she could denounce 
it now, however indeterminately; that when the 
smoke of the conflict was cleared away things would 
be once more in an orderly plan, if she could just 
hold to something, she did not know what, until it 
was over. 

“Oh, yes, you’re just mad because I’ve got one of 
your beaux,” said Marthena, who had resumed her 
natural acting after a long fallow period. She 
laughed her next sentence. ‘‘Perhaps I’m not so un¬ 
attractive after all.” 

“Perhaps not,” echoed Dagmar, still in a state of 
haze. “Look here, Alec, I am not going to let you 


THE BRILLIANT IDEA 


287 


ruin your life, whatever happens, just to get us out 
of a scrape. It looks to me as if everybody’s life is 
spoiled that I know of, but there’s no reason why 
you, a mere outsider, should horn”—her voice broke 
on the attempt at raillery—“ in on our troubles.” 

“But, Dagmar,” said Alec, melted to agony at the 
quaver in her voice. “I’m not a mere outsider. I 
can stand anything but that. Please don’t think 
of me that way. Why, if you’d just think of me, 
as—well, as some one who helped you out once when 
you needed it, I’d be perfectly happy all my life. 
And I know you’re going to be awfully happy with 
Pal, and honestly, Dagmar, I’m awfully glad you are 
going to, because I think he’s a fine chap, and I— 
really, Dagmar, I’d be awfully—I’d just love to do 
it for you.” 

“I’m going out,” said Dagmar hysterically. “All 
these people! Oh, we’re crowded together just like 
animals. I ’ ve go t to ge t out. ” 

She ran out of the room, and Alec followed her, 
holding her coat up futilely, and begging her to take 
it as he ran. That night they tramped the streets, 
Alec silently beside Dagmar, while she tried to sift 
out the emotions and impressions of the last twenty- 
four hours and arrive at a sane solution of the terrible 
problem of Herbie. 

Marthena would have to be married. That much 


288 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


she had decided, or rather accepted as the decision 
of all of them. “He’ll have to marry her,” she said 
surprisingly to Alec after a long silent mile. 

“But he can’t support her,” said Alec depre- 
catingly. “I mean, he’s a fine chap and all that, 
but-” 

“Lazy,” said Dagmar. “I know.” And they 
tramped on. By and by as their feet marched with 
an interminable rhythm over the hard resounding 
pavements something began to sing in the move¬ 
ments : tea-time-toi-lers-tea-time-toi-lers! 

“My grandfather,” she said in another of her in¬ 
coherent bursts, “I’m thinking of him. He used to 
say that we were a family of tea-time toilers, and 
that we liked the cream, the froth of everything. 
He thought we were the last word, but when we 
haven’t anything under us we break down.” 

“Oh, Dagmar, you don’t. You’re wonderful! ” 

Perhaps so small a thing as this bit of Alec’s faith 
turned the fortune of all of them, for Dagmar sud¬ 
denly had the conviction, which had been growing 
in her since the arrival of Herbie, blossom into 
full being, that the whole burden of the family’s 
exquisite laziness would fall on her, as it had once 
fallen on Margaret. And the age-old glory of sacri¬ 
fice descended over her; caught, possibly, from 
Alec Jones. 



THE BRILLIANT IDEA 289 

She turned on her heel and walked back to the 
apartment, where she announced with a tragedy that 
none of them noticed that Herbie must marry Mar- 
thena, after all. Herbie accepted his fate with a sort 
of relief which childishly asked no questions. Mar- 
thena gratefully overwhelmed Dagmar with a shower 
of sisterly love, and at the wedding, next day, Alec 
Jones acted as best man, while Martin Plunkitt so¬ 
berly gave his sister away. 


CHAPTER SIX 


THUS THINGS PROCEED IN THEIR CIRCLE: 

THUS THE EMPIRE IS MAINTAINED 

The twilight hovered, an elusive shadow and the 
sky, like a mammoth opal being imperceptibly 
shriven of its fire, had cooled in the east to a still, 
hushed blue. The lights along the avenue had a 
jaunty defiant air of adorning nature, and the mo¬ 
tors running briskly along were incredibly unaware of 
the hush brooding on all the world. 

It was the end of a wonderful week that Dagmar 
had spent with Pal, a time which was always com¬ 
pletely beautiful to her because of the spiritual 
glamour of sacrifice that interwove it and sang 
through every incident. And on this, her last night 
before she was to take the train that was to carry 
her back to St. Paul, she was to tell him of her 
decision. 

“The first night of summer,” thought Dagmar 
poetically, “and before another summer I shall be 
married, and forever lost to happiness.” She was 
vaguely happy as she thought of herself in the fu¬ 
ture, empty and splendid like a carved, wineless 
goblet, for the nearness of Pal gave this future only 

290 


THUS THINGS PROCEED 


291 


a sentimental reality. She could have wept emo¬ 
tional, satisfying tears. “Marriage and then a con¬ 
tinual round of searching, searching, searching, to 
get back to this moment,” thought Dagmar. “To 
taste just for one instant what I am drinking to¬ 
night. Youth. Love. Everything, but most of all 
Pal. ” 

The unsuspecting Pal beamed down at her. ‘ ‘ Won¬ 
derful night. ” 

She smiled gently. She thought of the valley 
from her old room at home over which she had looked 
down through her childhood. The valley as chang¬ 
ing and as changeless as the sea, where she had so 
often sat while the wayward butterfly of her thoughts 
flitted from image to image of incidents in which Pal 
was the dominant figure. There was always the 
same reach to the distant bluffs across the invisible 
river, just as there was always Pal to think about, 
and the trailing mists had always only modified the 
pictures. “It was all a looking forward to the mo¬ 
ment I am living now, ” she thought romantically. 

They walked until a theatrical moon of animated 
gold appeared in the sky. It seemed covered with 
a thick down, almost fleecy. The white clouds be¬ 
hind it were a foamy sea through which its faint 
path suffered a slow dilution. “It’s like the South 
Sea Islands,” breathed Dagmar. 


292 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


“In the ‘Follies,’” added Pal. 

Some clock of many-colored tones struck a qua¬ 
vering note and died on the air; a pause and then 
another strike rang out, and Dagmar knew that 
eight more strikes would come and it would be ten 
o’clock and time to begin the preliminaries of her 
parting with Pal. 

“I’ve something to say,” she said rather timidly. 

“Then say it with food,” invited Pal. “I’m 
starving. ” He led her into a restaurant, though she 
protested, for in her mood, she felt that the glaring 
lights of a public place were no fitting setting for 
what she had to say. When Pal had youthfully 
ordered beefsteak, she told him in sketchy outlines 
that she had made up her mind to marry Will. 
“But give me a little time, Dagmar,” said Pal des¬ 
perately when he understood that she was serious, 
which at first he could not believe. “Some day I’ll 
have money. And then I’ll take on the responsi¬ 
bility of Herbie. Dagmar, it won’t be long-” 

“It’s not Herbie,” said Dagmar. “It’s not a 
sacrifice for Herbie alone. It’s just that I realize 
you can’t have too many luxuries in a family. If 
you’re lazy you can’t have other things. You can’t 
triumph over poverty, for instance—be like you are, 
I mean, so wonderful and proud. ” Her voice broke 
and then gained a sudden strength as she finished. 




THUS THINGS PROCEED 


293 


“That’s what I love about you, that efficiency in 
spite of blotches. ” 

“You don’t trust me, ” said the boy. “You won’t 
let me be efficient for you. ” 

“You can’t be—for me. It’s just that all of us 
are what grandfather called tea-time toilers. We 
want to dance on the top of things, but when there’s 
nothing under us we fall. ” 

“You’d have me under you,” said Pal wildly. 
“Dagmar, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I’ll never 
forgive you. I’ll never forgive you.” 

She began again and told him the whole story of 
Marthena and Herbie. Perhaps the self-satisfac¬ 
tion which is the special gift of the righteous was a 
little too evident in her narrative as she ended: “The 
strong prey on the weak in the beginning, thus mak¬ 
ing them weaker than ever, and thus the strong have 
the weak on their hands. Therefore they must take 
care of them, which they do to their own discomfort, 
and therefore it will be up to me to marry a man 
who not only can but will take care of me and the 
whole family, including my charming sister-in-law.” 

“Dagmar, I can’t bear you and your infant phi¬ 
losophizings,” said Pal wryly. He rested his head 
on his hand and looked at her with pain-wracked 
blue eyes that were to haunt her for a long time. 

“I can’t bear myself, either, Pal. But please un- 


294 


LAZY LAUGHTER 


derstand I’m incapable of sustained action. I know 
that, and you don’t believe it. I couldn’t bear it, if 
you did believe it. But I can splurge and do big, 
grand things. I’m capable of sacrificing you and 
me and, oh!” she closed her eyes, “the beautiful, 
beautiful, you know, the usness of everything ! But 
I can’t just work from day to day and-” 

“Let’s kill ourselves,” said Pal, but even as he 
said it, in the face of Dagmar’s bleak phrases, it 
sounded, not heroic, not depressing, just childish 

“If we only could,” sighed Dagmar, “if we only 
could.” She put her elbows with their tight silk 
sleeves on the table and rested her chin on her hands 
to look up at him, more beautiful than she had ever 
been in her life. “Isn’t it funny. Here we sit, 
eating beefsteak and parting, parting—” Under 
his eyes, a small gasp stopped her and tears came to 
her eyes. “Let’s not think about it any more. 
There’s half an hour more. Let’s be gay. Let’s pre¬ 
tend that this is the first night we’ve met, and we 
have everything ahead of us, days and days of Pal¬ 
ishness-” 

“And Dagmarishness,” smiled Pal responsively. 
“It’s funny how alike we are,” Dagmar was think¬ 
ing; “that we can both laugh and yet understand 
that it’s tragic underneath.” 

Later, in her stuffy upper berth, Dagmar lay, pil- 




THUS THINGS PROCEED 


295 


lowless, flat on her stomach like an animal burrow¬ 
ing into the ground. “Pal, Pal, Pal,” said her 
heart over and over, and the wheels under her 
turned round and round. “Farther and farther 
from Pal,” they sang, “farther and farther and 
farther.” Cruel wheels, if they would only stop 
their senseless repetition. But they couldn’t and 
each revolution was taking her farther and farther 
and farther. “Oh, God, I wish I knew! I wish I 
knew! Is this really right or am I just being a 
weakling like the rest of the family, . . . taking the 
easiest way? I’ve never wanted money. I’ve never 
wanted money. Only love. . . . Only love. . . .” 
Farther and farther and farther . . . farther and 
farther and farther. . . . 
































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